Fiber permitting process could crush digital divide dreams

President and CEO of The Permitting Institute Alex Herrgott laid out a discouraging amount of challenges to the permitting process in order to lay fiber in unserved areas. Herrgott said organizations that embark on a fiber deployment project to unserved areas may have to interact with multiple federal, state and local agencies, none of whom coordinate together, and none of whom are at all concerned about the time-value-of-money for the company that has capital on the line. He added, “No one in the last 30 years has gone in and taken a hard look at the overlapping nature and redundancy of these statutes that hold capital back and raise the cost of debt equity for those that are actually operating in the telecommunications broadband.” Gary Bolton, CEO of the Fiber Broadband Association, said, “What you’ve laid out seems like an almost impossible gauntlet of permitting to get through. I’m kind of flabbergasted at the bureaucracy.” He noted that Congress has passed the infrastructure bill with $65 billion dedicated toward broadband to close the digital divide, “and the amount of time suck and resources that’s going to be spent on permitting is kind of unnerving.” Herrgott said the mission of The Permitting Institute "is just to enhance coordination across federal and state decision makers.” According to him, " As it stands now, the way it works, nobody talks to each other.”