JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – It’s been touted as legislation that aims to expand high-speed broadband to rural parts of the Show-Me State, but as HB 1880 reached the Senate floor once again, it became clear that one issue mattered: property rights.
HB 1880, sponsored by Rep. Curtis Trent and Sen. Mike Cunningham, seeks to codify that it is the public policy of the state to provide access to high-speed and reliable broadband utilizing contracts with electric cooperatives.
Supporters of the bill note that electric cooperatives are already using broadband to facilitate some of their electric transmissions.
But the issue of property rights has stalled the bill at every turn in Missouri’s upper chamber, as some senators expressed displeasure with the bill, saying it takes away from landowners’ property and rights, giving them little or nothing in return. The issue lies with the fact that to expand broadband, the coops would need to upgrade some of the cabling going through landowners’ lands by going onto previously existing right of ways.
“The coops are already there, and they can do it so much cheaper than the big companies,” Cunningham said. “I just want the coops to be treated the same as other utilities… And if they make a mistake, they ought to pay for it.”
“Right of way doesn’t automatically give you a royalty,” Sen. Ed Emery said, a sentiment Cunningham agreed with.
Sen. Rob Schaaf led the charge against that provision of the bill, noting that he wasn’t killing the bill, but said that his heart lay with the landowners in this issue.
“They were paid fair market value for the one time use of their land,” Schaaf said, stating that from his point of view, coops were coming along with broadband wanting to lease land and get a residual income stream off of it.
The landowners, however, would not.
“They don’t need it,” Schaaf said of the coops. “It’s done to help the coops, but it’s done at the expense of the landowners.”
“I want them to negotiate with the property owners going forward, and I think that’s only fair,” Schaaf told Sen. Dave Schatz on the Senate floor Wednesday night. “Let’s not change the rules after they already bought their land?”
“Why shouldn’t the landowner be compensated?” Schatz asked. “The question here is what is a fair compensation.”
Sen. Bill Eigel and Schaaf, while discussing the bill, stumbled upon an idea which might address their concerns: a proposal that would ensure a fair market value piece, but put a penalty, some punitive damages in place for companies who trespass without seeking the landowner’s permission and negotiation.
“We don’t want a scenario in which the broadband coop will face the same cost whether they do the right way by negotiating with the landowners up front as opposed to doing the wrong way where they trespass and go to court,” Eigel said, telling his colleagues that he understood the bill as just providing an additional liability protection for rural coops.
“We don’t want the transmission or distribution coops to think that they now have a blanket pass to trespass,” Schatz said. “I don’t want to incentivize someone to trespass.”
Sen. Brian Munzlinger said that, more than anything, it seems that the Senate needs to clarify the definition of “trespass” in this instance.
And after more than two hours of debate, the bill passed with a final vote of 32-1.
Benjamin Peters was a reporter for The Missouri Times and Missouri Times Magazine and also produced the #MoLeg Podcast. He joined The Missouri Times in 2016 after working as a sports editor and TV news producer in mid-Missouri. Benjamin is a graduate of Missouri State University in Springfield.
