I may be missing something but is the suggestion that local municipalities dig their last mile and run their own fiber?

That's ... Not likely to succeed surely? I assume the actual dig out is a specialised job, with no private hire market, the back haul ... To where and to whom? Do most towns know where their nearest telehouse/interconnect is? The support tasks are difficult - and scale pretty well, but not if you have no scale.

Ultimately this sounds like "hey let's build a public ally owned nationwide fiber network!" Why not start at that point?