Andrew Campanelli Video 1:  How to control the placement of Cell Towers, Small Cells and DAS Nodes

An introduction to how local governments can control the placement of wireless facilities, under the “General Authority” which The United States Congress preserved to them under Section 47 U.S.C. § 332(c)(7)(A) of The Telecommunications Act of 1996.

Transcript of video online from lawyer Andrew Campanelli Video 1:  How to control the placement of Cell Towers, Small Cells and DAS Nodes

How to control the placement of cell towers, small cells, and DAS nodes in your city, county, town, or village

Contrary to what you may have heard otherwise, when Congress enacted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, it explicitly preserved to state and local governments the general authority to regulate the placement of wireless facilities in their jurisdiction.

If your local municipal attorney has told you oh your hands are tied in the Telecommunications Act and that you can’t control these things and you can’t turn down applications, you need to get a new attorney.  You need to get (?)

There are 2 simple keys to exercising the powers that Congress preserved to you under the act.  

The first of course is that you must enact local zoning ordinance provisions that have permanent requirements and other requirements for wireless facilities.  

So sophisticated governments for years have required use permits, DAS use permits, conditional use permits, site planner approvals and even variances and they will set forth restrictions on which district you can put them in, height limitations, set back zones, fall zones, things like that.

Most local codes aren’t too bad when it comes to that.  

The most glaring deficiency which most local codes suffer is that you must also impose procedural guidelines.  

You must give your local boards procedural guidelines to understand how to comply with the 5 procedural requirements with the Telecommunications Act of 1996 imposes upon that.

I mentioned that Congress preserved the general power and that’s under the Sub Paragraph A of the Telecommunications Act.  Under Sub Paragraph B Congress enacted 5 essentially procedurally requirements.  

The truth is most local governments and most local boards always violate those requirements because they don’t know what they are.  You can’t comply with procedural requirements when you don’t know what they are.  So you must amend your code to put them in there.  

It’s not a question of having the power.  You have the power available to you.  You must simply understand how to exercise it.

Now if you think you’re going to use your local municipal attorney to update your code when they don’t know anything about Telecommunications Act, don’t bother.  You might as well throw your money out the window.  Because the results are going to be the same and you’ll have less aggregation.  

Time and time again I’ve seen I’ve seen local governments go to their general municipal attorney.  

Maybe they’ll spend an hour studying the Telecommunications Act and think they have it down.  

If you do that it virtually guarantees that site developers are going to be able to basically ram a facility down your throat and if you have the audacity to stand up to them, they’ll sue you in federal court and they’ll win

It’s more important than ever to enact these types of provisions because in the 5G rollout, site developers are more aggressive than ever trying to put these things wherever they want.  One of the reasons that’s problematic is that site developers are company engaged in business to make money.  They don’t look to build wireless facilities in the least intrusive locations, on the contrary.  They look to build them in the cheapest locatioin and they can say or do most anything.  When they appear before local zoning boards, local zoning boards are completely ill equipped to deal with that.  

As of now, in most applications I’m looking at, in 90% of applications, the applicants submit false or materially misleading information.  They routinely submit false propagation maps, false FCC compliance reports, material misleading real estate appraisal reports, misleading visual impact analysis.  The problem is that there is no guidance in the code to show the planning board how to recognize when a when a FCC compliance report is patently false.  If you don’t’ put that guidance in the code, you’ve basically thrown your planning board members to the wolves.  They’re totally ill-equipt to deal with it

It’s aggravating for me at this point having handled cases across the United States.  Many times I’ve heard applicants mislead local governments.  When they leave, they laugh at how gullible the local zoning officials are.  That’s one of the principal reasons why I’ve put up these videos and I hope you find them informative.   

So you need to have a telecommunications lawyer look into your local zoning ordinance and give you advice as to how to best give you the maximum power to regulate the placement wireless facilities to prevent the irresponsible placement of these facilities and the adverse impacts they almost invariably inflict upon home owners and communities.

So I hope you like this video to comply with the rules governing attorneys in New York.  

I have to say the words attorney advertisers.  

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