Local Issues Facing Tower Firms Dominate PCIA Agenda

Among the federal issues Fitch noted: Chmn. Martin recently started to circulate a rulemaking on making towers less deadly for birds (CD Sept 22 p2). But there’s no basis for the Commission rules, he said. “From the standpoint of someone who did a lot of FCC regulation for a lot of years, I don’t think you could base any regulation on the record they have before them,” he said: “It’s self-contradictory, inconsistent, unsubstantiated.”

At the FAA, PCIA opposes an agency move to impose new rules on RF emissions based on air safety, Fitch said. “FAA has a historic reputation as a difficult agency. They kind of see the world from their perspective,” he said. “I'm never comfortable assuming the FAA won’t do something, even when you have a very negative record. And I think they were surprised by the record they got. They got a hugely negative record in response to their notice.” But under administrative law, he said, “they are obliged to step back and rethink what they're proposing.”

At the FCC, PCIA recently asked the Commission to revise and update its Part 17 rules to account for advances in technology, such as improved remote monitoring of cell towers. Fitch has no reading on the agency reaction to the petition, he said: “It literally was filed a week ago, so it’s still early to speculate.”

Fitch joined PCIA last year after heading the bureau that became the Wireless Bureau, as senior legal adviser to Chmn. Dennis Patrick and as a deputy asst. secy. of state.

Much PCIA attention goes to local issues, and unfavorable decisions on towers on one area can reverberate nationally, he said. “Some jurisdictions have a bigger business impact on member companies than others,” Fitch said, because the govts.’ actions are emulated elsewhere. “If they start to go down a wrong path, you want try to change that as soon as you can,” he said: “And some states have a long history of being prickly on these issues.”

As an example, Fitch cited a complaint in Beaufort County, S.C. by pilots spraying mosquitoes. The pilots, who fly low at dawn and dusk, want the county to make tower owners put on more lights than the FAA does, including lights on towers low enough that FAA requirements don’t apply.

“You would create an inconsistency with what’s lit and not lit,” Fitch said. “Tower companies don’t want to retrofit equipment that met all the requirements when it was constructed. And quite frankly they don’t want to do a lot of pointless additional expenditures that don’t address safety.”

Local govts. don’t always see that the cost of such changes are passed on to wireless consumers, Fitch said, citing a campaign by Albuquerque to require all celltowers be camouflaged. “That doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You've got a city with an industrial zone. You've got a city with a rail yard. You've got a city with warehouses. The idea that you would try to hide everything no matter what the situation -- whether remote or not, whether in a residential area or an industrial zone -- doesn’t make economic sense. And these added costs have to get paid by somebody. They don’t get eaten by the tower industry.”

PCIA spends time and resources educating local officials, reminding them that more towers mean better cell service, a link often overlooked, Fitch said: “Every time we're able to get educational facts out to either the authorities or the public you start to get a lot more sensible decisionmaking.”

Tower companies, once overextended carrying high- interest debt, now face far fewer risks, Fitch said, calling the mood at last week’s annual meeting positive. “Industry is really good financial shape,” he said: “The issues are more around ‘what’s the rate of growth?’ than ‘is there growth?’… Use is just going up like wildfire and the consolidation among both carriers and tower companies has put them in a much stronger position to continue the needed expansion. Everybody has got the capital resources to do the planning, to do the buildout, to do it in a relatively rapid way.”

Last week PCIA released results of a literature review of other studies on risks to public health by RF emissions. The review concluded: “As of this date, it is our opinion that there is virtually no reliable, scientific reason to conclude that RFE emissions produced by wireless base station facilities present a significant health risk.”

“PCIA hopes that this important data will assuage the sometimes emotional fears about RF, and that this issue will no longer have any impact on decisions on wireless infrastructure siting,” Fitch said.