FCC Official Seeks to Calm Local Regulators’ Fears of Rush to Judgment on Wireless-Siting Complaints
SAN FRANCISCO -- An FCC official took pains to reassure local officials that a commission inquiry into wireless antenna siting will require hard proof of industry complaints about city and county burdens rather than accepting anecdotes and generalizations at face value. “We haven’t reached any conclusions,” said Associate Chief Deena Shetler of the Wireline Bureau, discussing the point at length at the NATOA conference. She spoke a few hours after a panel Thursday in which a NATOA official had called inaccurate a list of localities that a PCIA filing has complained to the FCC about, and a Montgomery County, Md., official got strong applause for rebuking the PCIA president and a Wireless Bureau official (CD Sept 23 p10).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
If your job depends on informed compliance, you need International Trade Today. Delivered every business day and available any time online, only International Trade Today helps you stay current on the increasingly complex international trade regulatory environment.
"There might be some more work to do” in “four areas that seem to rise to the top” in identifying “trends that are coming out” of complaints filed in response to an FCC notice of information about accelerating broadband deployment, Shetler said. The commission “may be able to work with associations” on “education” about “best practices and procedures” in handling installations of distributed antenna systems, she said. Second, “I can’t say what we're going to do” about requests for collocation and replacement technologies, “but that is an issue,” Shetler said.
There seems to be “not necessarily a pervasive nationwide issue but “outlier issues” regarding state and local rights-of-way, Shetler said. And as an expert agency the FCC can speak to other federal agencies about problems with the handling of environmental and historic-preservation requirements, though the commission can’t tell them what to do, Shetler said. The FCC also is considering giving “recognition” to “communities that are doing a really outstanding job” handling siting, she said.
More than 2,000 pages of comments have been filed in the proceeding, Shetler said. “It’s good to know that someone cares about what you're doing,” she quipped. The commission has “really truly left” open whether there’s “a problem, and if there is, what is it?” Shetler said. “We didn’t assume that there’s a problem.” She said “an anecdote is not data” and “what we're trying to do is collect real information."
"All of us are very pleased to hear that,” Jodie Miller, NATOA’s policy and legal committee chair, said from the audience.
The commission recognizes the importance of considerations besides the desires of installation applicants, Shetler said. “There are safety issues,” she said. “There are weather issues. There are issues that are important to your constituents.” There’s “balancing that we can’t do from a national perspective,” Shetler said. And neither side can claim a monopoly on virtue, she said. “There are no completely clean hands.” But FCC officials “see industry more than we see you” through the presence of permanent lobbyists, she acknowledged.
A statement in the notice of inquiry that the FCC may not wait for the proceeding’s end before taking any action shouldn’t alarm local regulators, Shetler said. That was just to “let people know” that “we're not slow-rolling the issue,” she said. Chairman Julius Genachowski wants prompt action taken as needed, Shetler said. But the commission is “not acting precipitously,” she said.
Requests for extensions of two-year deadlines to spend broadband stimulus money are citing hitches that hadn’t been anticipated, said Deputy RUS Administrator Jessica Zufolo. These include environmental and historic-preservation requirements and a shortage of fiber resulting from the Japanese earthquake, she said. “That’s becoming a bit of an issue for any fiber-based asset that’s being built.”