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House approves telecom finance bill after compromise that grandfathered early municipal participants
Summary
A lengthy floor debate over municipal telecommunications financing (first substitute Senate Bill 66) ended with a compromise substitute amendment that grandfathered roughly 18 municipalities that had already invested, required notice and public hearings for later entrants, and recorded final passage by the House (52–23).
First substitute Senate Bill 66 — the large municipal telecommunications and financing measure often discussed in the context of the UTOPIA municipal broadband effort — dominated the time-certain portion of the March 1 floor session.
Representative Urquhart framed the issue around four concerns: exclusivity (municipalities should not lock in a single private provider), intermixing of project revenues with general…
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