National Park Service Waives More Than A Million Dollars In Fees For Yellowstone Fiber Optics

More than $1 million in fees have been waived by the National Park Service at Yellowstone National Park so a company can bury nearly 200 miles of fiber-optic cable that will largely serve its commercial customers, according to a watchdog group.

Additionally, the Park Service "will have to spend millions to lay spurs to connect with the cable," claims Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER).

Yellowstone officials did not immediately respond to inquiries about PEER's claims, which also question whether the park's world-renowned thermal functions could be impacted by trenching to bury the cables.

“National parks should not be subsidizing telecom companies,” said PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse said Tuesday, noting that the right-of-way fees Diamond Communications initially faced go to the U.S. Treasury. “Nor do national parks have an obligation to wire every square inch of park grounds.”

Yellowstone officials in recent years have been working to improve internet access in the park while at the same time removing telecommunications equipment in the general vicinity of Madison, one in the Old Faithful area, one on Bunsen Peak, and two on Buffalo Plateau.

When the park first announced in 2021 the proposal to thread 187 miles of fiber-optic cable through the park by following the main figure-eight road corridor, staff noted that just about 8 percent of Yellowstone had cellular service. The fiber-optic proposal would not expand authorized cellular phone coverage areas in the park, staff added, but would substantially improve coverage quality in existing developed areas.

While the proposal said no new cell towers would be included in the plan, and Yellowstone Superintendent Cam Sholly that year instituted a moratorium on additional cell towers in the park, PEER contends that moratorium has been lifted for Diamond Communications. 

As the efforts to install the fiber-optic cable advanced, the Park Service also backed away from charging Diamond Communications for, basically, renting the ground where the cable would be buried, PEER maintains. According to PEER, those annual fees would have started at more than $181,000 for the first year of the permit and climbed to more than $237,000 by 2033. However, by March 2024 the Park Service had decided to waive the fees, the group said.

"Diamond had objected to the Use and Occupancy fees in November 2023, and the discussions at NPS heated up in February and March 2024 with lots of 'briefings' and 'discussions,'" PEER notes in its internal timeline of discussions about the project. "However, our FOIA request yielded no e-mails discussing this subject (and the relevant regulations) from this five-month period."

The group's timeline also shows that Diamond Comunications last October approached park officials with a request to "add cell towers and other infrastructure at Norris, Madison, Tower, and Canyon, and even in the Lamar Valley. They want to link these additional sites to the fiber backbone as a way of generating additional revenue. Diamond will spend an estimated $40 million to build the fiber backbone in Yellowstone."

In December the Park Service published a final rule concerning right-of-way fees that allows a permittee to be exempt from the fees "if their infrastructure is exclusively… for a project that is clearly in the public interest and consistent with the purposes and values of the park area."

"Yellowstone is now engaged in the biggest single expansion of wireless capacity in its history, with 187 miles of fiber-optic cable being laid and the addition of at least four new cell towers, all by one company, Diamond Communications," PEER said.

PEER also raised concerns that trenching for the cable could damage thermal resources. "Despite these concerns, the excavation was approved with a Finding of No Significant Impact following a cursory environmental assessment," the group said.

“Yellowstone became America’s first park to preserve its unique thermal features,” Whitehouse said. “Today, the unique nature of Yellowstone is being threatened by the telecom industry.”