WASHINGTON-Despite carrier and Federal Communications Commission efforts to mitigate the situation, there still is plenty of confusion regarding wireless tower siting out in the suburbs. Many jurisdictions and their constituents either don’t understand new federal rules that mandate “no blocking” rules or they don’t care about the rules, preferring to take a strong “not in my back yard” stance. The key is to find some way of getting all parties together to trade as much information as possible in order to smooth the way for new wireless players while assuaging the concerns of Joe Citizen.
According to numbers expressed at last week’s FCC public forum on wireless service facilities siting issues, there have been 22,000 new wireless sites built out during the last 20 years, and another 100,000 sites are needed. What some jurisdictions apparently don’t understand is the difference between a tower and an antenna, and some cities have instituted moratoria on everything, which hinders build out of systems that don’t need the height.
However, most cities and states have chosen to work with carriers and the citizenry to resolve fears and NIMBY issues. Don Knight, assistant city attorney for Irving, Texas, said his city has divided siting requests into two categories-antennas on new towers and collocated antennas. The city has put a 120-foot limit on towers and requires collocation. The city also would like towers spaced 5,000 feet apart, “but that’s a guideline rather than a requirement,” Knight said, adding that personal communications services provider PrimeCo has collocated 80 percent of its antennas on existing towers in his area.
When planning its Charlotte, N.C., system, Mark Van Dyke of BellSouth Mobility said his group met with city planners about collocation; since then, BellSouth has been able to eliminate 85 planned towers.
Jim O’Conner, cable communications manager for Howard County, Md., said that county officials look to make municipal properties available to carriers first and that some zoning requirements have been changed. “We now have a new 300-foot monopole on a city golf course, and water tanks are being made available,” he said. AT&T Wireless, Sprint Spectrum and two cellular carriers have reaped the benefits of this new consideration, and O’Conner concluded that site negotiations “have been a fairly painless process all the way around.” Jane Lawton, cable communications administrator for a sister Maryland county, Montgomery, said some 360 new sites were going to be needed to serve her jurisdiction; this number could be reduced to 170 through collocation. There are so many requests for sites, she said, that the new county siting committee must meet every two weeks to consider them. The county also maintains a database of all available county sites that can be accessed by carriers.
While all this cooperation is admirable, what really is needed, according to FCC general counsel Bill Kennard, is a model franchising ordinance that could be used by all cities. “What we expect is a template to work with and to shop around, one with common issues and language,” he explained. However, Lawton said such a paper “probably wouldn’t work everywhere.”
During the question-and-answer period, members of the audience expressed concern that many jurisdictions, including Baltimore, “had no incentives yet for collocation. Can we tell a carrier `no’ if they don’t collocate? Can we tell them they can’t put towers near schools and day-care centers?” Others wondered if the FCC could tell manufacturers to make antennas and towers “less ugly,” because so many of them will be located in residential areas. And one representative of a fringe consumer group asked the commission how national security can be preserved “if the enemy can use infrared equipment to see all these antennas?”
