The tortoise is Tortoise Paging & Communications, of Ridgecrest, Calif., and the scare is the U.S. government.
This may not interest a lot of you. It’s a small-town story, not the kind likely to animate lawmakers or trade associations into action (though Rep. Bill Thomas (R-Calif.) is monitoring the situation).
The Bureau of Land Management’s Sacramento office, taking its cue from a 1995 congressional mandate that created a new, market-based communications site rental schedule, last month upped Tortoise’s bill from $4,400 a year to $37,000 a year-an 840-percent increase.
It was front-page news in The Daily Independent on March 9. That should tell you something. Nope, you won’t find Tortoise on RCR’s Top 20 list of paging operators. It’s a throw-back, mom-and-pop operation that serves about 1,400 customers.
In addition to Tortoise Paging, several other small communications firms providing public-safety and two-way business communications on El Paso Peak are affected by the BLM rental hike.
Ridgecrest is located 120 miles north of Los Angeles, high in a remote part of the Mojave Desert. The town boasts a population of 22,000. Its claim to fame is the Naval Air Weapons Center at China Lake, the No. 1 employer and victim of peace-dividend downsizing in recent years. Commercial real estate occupancy rates are down, and bankruptcy is rearing its ugly head.
Ed Tipler, of Tortoise Paging, has appealed the rental reassessment to the U.S. Board of the Interior’s Board of Land Appeals in Arlington, Va. He says the $37,000 a year BLM wants is more than the gross income from rentals and commercial repeater operations at his site.
Tipler argues the appraisal, performed for BLM by San Diego’s David Yerke, is littered with errors, starting with the comparison of Ridgecrest to the Los Angeles Basin and its 12 million population base. Yerke did not return a call for comment.
John Dearing, a spokesman for the California State Office of BLM in Sacramento, said the whopping rental increase is based on the potential for the signal from El Paso Peak to propagate east, west and north along California highways. East? Tipler said that’s in the direction of Death Valley.
If El Paso Peak is such a valuable site, though, why isn’t Tortoise rolling in money and subscribers? And why aren’t wireless titans fighting each other off to operate on the mountain top?
“I thought this ’95 thing had fixed all this,” said Tipler referring to the Congress’ 1995 table of rents for communications site uses. “That’s what kills me.”
Don’t know about Tipler, but an unfavorable government ruling on his BLM appeal could kill his modest paging operation.
