WASHINGTON, D.C. — Local governments are committed to universal access to affordable broadband, but they do not believe it should come blindly and at any cost, the TeleCommUnity Alliance told a presidential advisory panel on Wednesday.

“Such an unbalanced approach in favor of broadband deployment results in taxpayers at the local level subsidizing private industry, and local government will not stand idly by and allow such a policy to be enacted,” said Ron Mallard, Director of the Department of Cable Communications and Consumer Protection in Fairfax County, Virginia, a founding member of the TeleCommUnity Alliance.

Mallard, the immediate past president of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors, is Fairfax County’s representative to TeleCommUnity — an emerging coalition of cities and counties dedicated to preserving local governments’ interests in federal telecommunications policymaking. His comments on behalf of the Alliance came at a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

“Local governments are both the property owner and the property manager of the public rights of way,” Mallard told the Council. “State and local elected officials have a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders — the taxpayers — to manage all public property for its highest and best use ...

“Sound economics and political equity require that private entities using public property for private profit should pay fair and reasonable rents. These rents should reflect the fair-market valuation of the rights conveyed, whether by sale, lease, easment or temporary licenses to use.”

Disruption to communities, risks to public safety and added costs of maintaining streets are additional factors that impact local governments, increase costs to taxpayers and, thus, warrant telecommmunications companies paying reasonable rent for use of public rights of way, Mallard said. He noted that public rights of way are scarce and valuable — a commodity that a TeleCommUnity Alliance study has determined to be a $7 trillion asset nationwide.

“Telecom providers have a semi-exclusive, long-term use of particular portions of the public’s rights of way. Left to their own devices, broadband providers would transfer their costs of renting this real estate asset from company stockholders to city taxpayers,” Mallard said. “Local government needs the Administration’s support to ensure such a policy does not become a national practice.”

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Read Ron Mallard's testimony here.