The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has authority to try to speed up the process for installing wireless communications towers when local governments have been slow to act.
The case hinged on a federal law requiring state and local governments to act on tower-siting applications within a "reasonable period of time."
In a 6-3 vote, the court said that the agency has leeway to interpret ambiguity in the law about the extent of its regulatory authority.
The FCC had decided that 90-day and 150-day deadlines relating to decisions on cellphone towers were fair, and a federal appeals court upheld its decision.
AT&T Inc., Deutsche Telekom AG's T-Mobile USA Inc. and Verizon Wireless, a venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group Plc supported that view.
But Los Angeles, San Antonio, Arlington, Texas, and the New Orleans city council said the federal government had interfered with their power to enforce local zoning standards. They argued that the court should have exercised its own judgment rather than deferred to the FCC.
The case was closely watched by government agencies and those who are regulated by them because it touched on the question of how much deference agencies have to interpret the law.
In the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said there were many examples, endorsed by courts, in which federal agencies have made similar decisions about their decision-making authority.
"Where Congress has established a clear line, the agency cannot go beyond it," he said. But, "where Congress has established an ambiguous line, the agency can go no further than the ambiguity will fairly allow," he added.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a dissenting opinion airing what he described as his "fundamental" disagreement with Scalia.
"A court should not defer to an agency until the court decides, on its own, that the agency is entitled to deference," he said.
The two consolidated cases are City of Arlington v. Federal Communications Commission and Cable Telecommunications and Technology v. Federal Communications Commission, U.S. Supreme Court, Nos. 11-1545 and 11-1547.