Local Officials Bite Back at PCIA Complaints on Handling of Siting Requests
SAN FRANCISCO -- Local regulators responded sharply to PCIA complaints of delays and unreasonable demands on requests for wireless-antenna siting (CD July 20 p3), and one took the opportunity to vent at an FCC official, too. The moderator of a NATOA conference panel Thursday, Jodie Miller, said many of the localities on a long list included by PCIA in a comment in a commission inquiry on speeding up broadband deployment don’t have unlimited moratoria on installations and don’t understand why they were named as unduly balky. Replies are due Sept. 30 in WC Docket 11-59. Miller, from the North Dakota County, Minn., Cable Communications Commission, is the chair of NATOA’s policy and legal committee.
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The cable broadband communications administrator for Montgomery County, Md., Mitsuko Herrera, said from the audience that she was having trouble controlling her anger at comments by speaker Michael Fitch, PCIA’s president and Associate Chief Jane Jackson of the FCC Wireless Bureau. “Most of these sites were not intended to have that much on there,” Herrera replied to objections by Fitch to difficulties adding collocated facilities to wireless sites. To a statement by him that regulatory requirements in some cases may be intended to persuade applicants to make their installations elsewhere, she scoffed at “the idea that we don’t want these things.” Her county has allowed two distributed antenna systems, Herrera said. Fitch had said those facilities need “to be handled as a system” by local authorities, rather than “site by site by site.”
"We don’t need a lecture from an agency,” the FCC, “that doesn’t have its own act in order,” Herrera said. She told Jackson that localities need the commission to wrap up its work on pole attachments and the Universal Service Fund. “Say what you mean and mean what you say” when it comes to the FCC’s stated aim of making “data-driven” policy, Herrera said. She demanded that the commission insist on getting specific numbers from industry about the outcomes and timing of siting applications, instead of accepting generalized complaints. “Nobody’s looking at what is the size of the question,” Herrera said.
"I agree on the subject of filing actual information,” Jackson said. She added: “We are actually looking for the same thing you are asking. … We are interested in having anecdotes turned into data if they can be. We are not able to take good actions if we don’t have good data from both sides.” She had agreed with Fitch that adding collocated facilities is preferable to having towers proliferate.
Fitch said localities vary “in sophistication, in capability, in interest, in reasonableness.” There are “some great jurisdictions,” but there are also “some at the opposite end of the spectrum and lots in between,” he said. Earlier, Fitch had objected to local pushback on siting requests. He singled out indefinite moratoria and the “clawing back of rights that were already granted at a site” when a modification is sought. “From an industry standpoint, that’s really a horrible approach,” Fitch said.
"I'm just happy to be on a panel where there are more people to be upset at than me,” said Jeff Carlisle, LightSquared’s executive vice president for public policy. It’s “not fair for the companies to just come in and say, ‘We're not getting what we need.’ … We see it as a partnership” with local governments. LightSquared’s network agreement with Sprint is “a much more efficient way” than each company building its own national system, “and it should put much less burden on you-all,” Carlisle said.