A Conversation With InterConnect Towers President Tom Gammon

When it comes to developing towers, Tom Gammon plays the long game. His InterConnect Towers specializes in developing communication towers on federal government-owned land in California, Nevada and Arizona. To build the infrastructure, Gammon, a former top radio broker, must navigate a lengthy permitting process, invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, even sometimes survey monarch butterflies.  

Tell us about your journey from radio to the tower business. 

I started a radio station brokerage company focusing on large radio deals and by 1989 we were the largest in the country. Then I bought radio stations in the late 80s that could move in [to larger markets]. When I met with Mark Ein at The Carlyle Group, I said, “I’m going to sell my radio stations.”  And Mark said, “Tommy, you should keep the towers and sell the radio stations. I’ll go 50-50 with you.” He told me about a station group sale where 15% of the towers made 85% of the profit for Carlyle. And he said, “We should start a tower company focusing only on those 15 percenters.” So we started InterConnect Towers, a federal land cell tower company in January 1998. 

How did that go?

Bureau of Land Management (BLM) sites have so many tripwires, you can never project if you’re going to have a carrier when they’re fully built. In our first 14 years we built just 12 towers. And we sold those to Mark Ganzi’s Global Tower Partners (GTP) in 2008, during the financial crisis. In April 2012, I moved to California to restart this company and, by September, I had filed for 36 BLM tower sites in three states. I got one permit in six years. My wife and I hunted cell towers by reverse engineering the carriers’ existing towers in the 10 states that BLM land exists – 245 million acres – and we found about 115 sites. By 2013, we knew every site where you could build on BLM land that could have a carrier hit on it, with no cell towers in the vicinity that could cover it. 

What are the unique challenges of developing towers on federal land? 

You cannot project what will occur in the cell tower business on federal land. You need a massively long timeline and high-quality management with experience. When you have the required pre-application meeting with BLM, they show you the form that says this is going to take 18 to 24 months. To get a National Environmental Policy Act grant, there are 37 affected resources surveys required at a cost of roughly $15,000 per month. I’ve got that for 57 sites in permitting right now. And these all have future carrier needs, if you take a 10-year horizon. The difficulty is so high that you must use your own money, and you can’t give the carriers a date, ever. Fourteen years after restarting the company, I built just 18 towers.

What work have you done to help bring about permitting reform?

We filed extensive comments to allow communication sites for the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan and we got those comments adopted. President Obama signed it in September 2016. And we give our comments to the Wireless Infrastructure Association (WIA) and they file them. 

What attracted you to building BLM towers?

Our success in the 90s with a radio station tower that had two carriers hitting on it. When American Tower founder Steve Dodge sold his radio stations in 1997 to Westinghouse Electric Corp. for $1.6 billion, he kept the towers. I asked him what he looks for when he invests. And he said, “I will not invest without barrier-to-entry and good financing available.” And those stuck with me. Building towers on BLM land checks both those boxes. It’s a tricky business but if you get one, you have some pricing power. I get better rates, slightly better escalators, and second carriers pretty easily. When we sold those portfolios to Ganzi, for example, we sold 12 towers with 36 tenants. I just wrote up a site for over a million dollars last month that I filed in 2012. We did 12 weeks of surveys on monarch butterflies, an endangered species, at $4,000 a visit. I’ve been at this for 28 years. If you do it hard and long enough, with the right attitude and continuous learning, you come out smart.

By Paul Heine, Inside Towers Contributing Analyst

Paul Heine has covered radio/audio, media and marketing since 1985. He has held senior editorial management positions at Inside Radio, Radio & Records, Billboard Radio Monitor and the Friday Morning Quarterback (FMQB). Heine has also reported and analyzed media news and trends for Adweek, Mediaweek, Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter; appeared on “Today” and Fox News; and has been quoted in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and other publications. He began his career in on-air and programming positions at radio stations in Buffalo and Rochester, NY.