This site has spent the last month documenting community networks that work: Lehi's year-one take-rate numbers, Southwick's pilot built from money it already had, Colville's tribal fiber, The Dalles lighting up a 25-year-old idle loop. Every one of those projects has a common legal foundation, and it is not federal money. It is the authority of a local government to manage its own rights-of-way — to say who digs up whose streets, on what timeline, at what compensation, under what safety and restoration conditions.

On August 7, 2026, the FCC published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking — Build America: Eliminating Barriers to Wireline Deployments, WC Docket No. 25-253, 91 FR 51121 — that would take a large piece of that authority away. The comment cycle is live: initial comments closed September 21, reply comments are due November 5, 2026.

What the rule actually does

Four mechanisms, proposed together:

  1. A 120-day shot clock with a presumption attached. If a local government fails to process all authorizations for a deployment in a given right-of-way within 120 days of the provider's first application, the FCC proposes a rebuttable presumption that the city has "effectively prohibited" telecommunications service in violation of Section 253(a) of the Communications Act. The presumption doesn't auto-approve anything — it is ammunition for a Section 253(d) preemption petition or a court challenge. The FCC is also considering starting the clock at the first mandatory pre-application step rather than at a complete application, and applying it to batched applications and facilities outside the right-of-way, like fiber huts.

  2. Fee caps. Rights-of-way fees would be limited to "a reasonable approximation of the government's actual, direct costs of managing the rights-of-way," with proposed safe-harbor fee levels that presumptively comply. The FCC's own record cites per-linear-foot fees of $3.50 to $5.00 as the kind of thing it wants to end.

  3. In-kind compensation restricted. Requirements that providers repair curbs, leave spare conduit, or contribute other non-cash value would count against the safe-harbor fee levels — effectively converting negotiated community benefits into capped costs.

  4. No commingling conditions. Cities could not impose additional requirements or fees on the grounds that infrastructure built for wireline telecom might also carry other services.

The FCC frames this as the Build America agenda: it cites jurisdictions where permits took nine months, one city requiring 13 departments and 70 individuals to review a single application. Those delays are real. The disagreement — and it is a sharp one — is about the remedy, and about whether the FCC has the legal authority to impose it at all.

The record the cities filed

The initial comment round was a pile-on of local government associations: the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, and NATOA filed jointly on September 21, with the League of California Cities filing separately. The core arguments, from the record:

  • Section 253(c) affirmatively preserves local right-of-way management authority and the right to fair and reasonable compensation. The associations read Section 253(d) as authorizing case-specific preemption of a government's regulation — not a nationwide rulemaking that preempts a class of regulations across 90,000 local governments.
  • The federal comparison cuts against the FCC. Federal agencies get 270 days to process communications-use permits on federal land — and between 2018 and 2022, the BLM and Forest Service met that deadline only half the time. The Commission itself processed zero permits for communications uses on federal property between FY2024 Q2 and FY2026 Q2. The associations' filing argues the FCC has no operational experience justifying a 120-day standard for governments that coordinate excavation, traffic control, utility location, inspection, and restoration.
  • The delay problem is often the provider. The cities' filings document permit-hoarding — providers staking claimed space on poles and in conduits to crowd out competitors, then not building. Their counter-proposal: require ISPs to deploy within 180 days of local authorization, and police provider-caused delay instead of municipal review time.

There is a real problem on both sides of this record. Some local permitting is genuinely obstructive, and the FCC's examples are not invented. But a nationwide 120-day presumption that applies identically to the incumbent cable company and to a city engineer sequencing a hospital, a school, and a fire hall into one trench schedule is not a remedy — it is a leverage transfer.

Why this lands on community networks specifically

The proposed rules are formally neutral: they bind "state and local governments," not any particular builder. But neutrality of application is not neutrality of effect.

The presumption is a weapon for incumbents, not a shield for challengers. A municipal fiber project answers to a council, a budget cycle, and a public meeting schedule. An incumbent ISP answers to a quarterly deployment plan — and has lawyers. When a city slow-walks the incumbent's permit because the incumbent is hoarding pole space against a competitor, the incumbent now has a 120-day presumption to take to the Commission. The cities asked the FCC to police provider delay; this NPRM does the opposite.

Fee caps hit municipal cross-subsidy hardest. Rights-of-way fees are one of the few ways a locality recovers the true cost of hosting private infrastructure — inspection staff, road restoration, utility coordination. Capping them at "direct costs" with safe harbors shifts that cost onto taxpayers. For a small city running a broadband office like Jefferson County PUD's — one broadband manager, a handful of contractors — the fee line and the staffing line are the same budget.

In-kind restrictions close the negotiation table. Conduit swaps, restoration bonds, joint-trench conditions — the things that let a small city get fiber to anchor institutions as part of a private build — are exactly the kind of "in-kind compensation" the rule would count against the fee cap or prohibit outright. Southwick's pilot works in part because Whip City Fiber hosts the town's routing equipment across the border in Westfield, saving Southwick a six-figure central office. Deals like that are the texture of municipal broadband. A federal presumption that in-kind demands are presumptively suspect makes them harder to write.

To be honest about the other side: a 120-day clock would speed up some municipal builds too — Los Alamos County waited a decade of studies and council meetings before its network broke ground, and permit cycles are part of that. Speed is not the enemy. The question is who gets to set the terms of what happens in a public right-of-way. The rule answers: not the public that owns it.

The live counterexample: Los Alamos

While the Commission drafts rules premised on local governments being incapable of managing deployment, Los Alamos County, New Mexico is finishing one. Atomic Fiber is a county-owned, open-access fiber-to-the-premise network: a $35 million design-build contract with Bonfire, financed with $40 million in gross-receipts-tax revenue bonds, covering 10,000+ homes and businesses across Los Alamos and White Rock. Construction began in May; the county says first customers come online by December.

The model is the one this site keeps coming back to, because it keeps being the answer: the county owns the infrastructure — "like roads and water lines" is their language — and four independent ISPs (XMission, Anthem Broadband, Intellipop, LANet) compete on top of it across five symmetrical tiers from 250 Mbps to 8 Gbps. Bonfire operates the network under a five-year renewable agreement up to twenty years and is contractually barred from being one of the retail ISPs. The county added a $4.4 million middle-mile partnership with the Pueblo of San Ildefonso for route redundancy off the plateau. New Mexico, for its part, passed legislation this year empowering its PRC to offer $30/month discounted broadband to roughly 173,000 qualifying households.

The county's origin story is the part worth repeating: officials asked private carriers to build it, and the private sector declined — "the private sector was unwilling to take the project." That is the whole community-network pattern in one sentence, and it runs directly against the FCC's framing. The providers asking for a 120-day clock are, in Los Alamos, the ones who wouldn't build at all.

The same week Atomic Fiber made its announcements, Jefferson County PUD in Washington State passed 1,000 open-access connections — 400+ miles of fiber built since 2023 on $64M in grants, headed for 2,000 by year-end — and Chicopee Electric Light in Massachusetts completed a ten-year citywide build serving 6,300 homes and 150 businesses without borrowing capital for construction. These are local governments managing rights-of-way competently, at scale, right now. The record the FCC would need to justify presuming them negligent does not exist.

What to do between now and November 5

Reply comments are due November 5, 2026 at the FCC's ECFS system, WC Docket No. 25-253. Filings are public. The National League of Cities' comment guidance is the useful template, and it asks for the thing this site always asks for: specifics.

  • Document your actual timelines. Steps, staff hours, consultant costs, per-authorization, for real deployments. The FCC's proposal claims delay is presumptively prohibitive past 120 days; the rebuttal is data, not adjectives.
  • Document provider-caused delay. Permit-hoarding, incomplete applications, abandoned authorizations. If the Commission wants to legislate about delay, make it legislate about all of it.
  • Price your fees honestly. If your fees exceed direct costs, know why — cross-subsidized inspection? restoration reserves? — and be ready to defend the number or fix it. The safe-harbor structure rewards cities that have already done this math.
  • Note what works. The NLC guidance asks cities to describe local processes that expedite deployment while protecting residents. A working one-stop permit process is evidence against a nationwide presumption.

If you are not a city — a co-op, a WISP, a community network volunteer — file anyway. The docket takes comments from any interested party, and the record currently skews heavily toward incumbents arguing for the rule and local governments arguing against it. The missing voice is the small operator who depends on both fair local terms and fast authorization.

The honest outlook

The NPRM was adopted on a bipartisan vote, and Chairman Carr's Build America agenda is not shy about where it stands. Commissioner Gomez flagged serious doubts about Section 253 authority — doubts the League of California Cities' filing turns into a full legal argument — so whatever gets adopted will likely be litigated on federalism grounds for years. The reply-comment round will shape the final text: whether the clock starts at first submission or at completeness, whether batches are covered, what the safe-harbor fee numbers are, and whether preemption petitions get fast-tracked to the Bureau level.

Nothing here is settled, and that is exactly the point. Between now and November 5, the terms of a presumption that would follow every right-of-way negotiation for the next decade are being written. The community networks this site documents are proof that local governments can build and run this infrastructure. This docket decides how much of the legal ground under that proof gets preserved — and the deadline is real.

Sources: FCC NPRM, Build America: Eliminating Barriers to Wireline Deployments, WC Docket No. 25-253, 91 FR 51121, August 7, 2026 (comments closed September 21, 2026; reply comments due November 5, 2026); FCC Fact Sheet, DOC-422166; National League of Cities, September 8, 2026; US Conference of Mayors/NACo/NLC/NATOA joint comments, September 21, 2026 (summarized via Cahill client alert); Ars Technica, September 22, 2026; Los Alamos County Atomic Fiber project pages and atomicfiber.net; ILSR / communitynetworks.org, September 23, 2026; Peninsula Daily News, September 25, 2026; American Public Power Association, September 18, 2026.