I was once told that Dallas has such a great highway system because during the oil bust in the mid ’80s, business people ruled the local government bodies and did whatever was necessary (build roads) to help locate business in the economically depressed city.
While Dallas in particular and Texas in general still may provide tax incentives and the like to lure companies to the area, it doesn’t seem to appreciate its wireless businesses.
The state already concocted a plan that initially disproportionately charged wireless carriers, including paging firms, to pay to wire Texas schools to the information superhighway.
Most recently, the city of Dallas is trying to force wireless carriers like Teligent Inc. to pay franchise fees to do business in the city. Cities traditionally have charged telecom and cable TV carriers franchise fees to compensate the public when those carriers disrupt city property by digging holes to lay their wires.
However, the City of Dallas wants to make its franchise fee policy broad enough so that companies that do not physically dig on public land still have to contribute to city coffers.
The city argues that even though companies like Teligent transmit wirelessly, when the call interconnects to the public switched telephone network, Teligent is using capacity leased from a franchised facilities-based carrier that uses public rights of way.
Evidently, the city is ignoring the fact that a carrier like Teligent is probably leasing capacity from Southwestern Bell Telephone, which already has paid the franchise fee for the rights of way.
Teligent won a preliminary injunction against the city of Dallas, and a judge recently ruled in favor of AT&T in a similar dispute against the city of Austin.
Nevertheless, it is clear these municipalities are not concerned so much with making sure the public is compensated for allowing businesses access to city property, but instead are focusing on finding another revenue source.
Instead of fretting about potential lost revenue, the city of Dallas should rejoice that its constituents can get another telecom choice, and no one has to dig up a bunch of streets to offer it.
The Competitive Telecommunications Association has proposed a set of public rights-of-way principles that it hopes municipalities will follow. One of its principles states plainly that “the use of public rights-of-way should be defined as physical occupancy of public property.”
A principle that is not mentioned, but that should be, is that wireless carriers should not be seen as cash cows for government.
