In preparation for the mass deployment of 5G, both officials and carriers in Escondido believe it’s time to make the permit process for small cells blazing fast, reports the San Diego Reader.
Escondido City Planner Jay Paul said during a May 24th City Council meeting, “We’re getting a lot of pressure from the wireless industry to process applications for small cells in the right-of-way.” This includes street lights, utility poles, and traffic signs as well as residential areas including apartments and single-family homes.
A new state bill introduced by Sen. Ben Hueso, D-San Diego, would strip local control over small cell placement, even in residential zones. The League of Cities and those who have health concerns oppose SB 649, reports the San Diego Reader.
North County resident Susan Foster, who advocates for public safety regarding RF noted, “There will be cell towers approximately every ten homes, with loud backup generator equipment to support the infrastructure.”
Currently, the City Council receives dozens of applications for permits to allow a tower within a 500-foot radius of a home thereby overwhelming the system, according to Paul. The current permit process can take up to six months and costs $4,500, requiring public notice at the sites and in the newspaper.
Conversely, the new ordinance includes a faster, cheaper administrative permit, which means streamlined rules, batched processing, and no public review for the city’s preferred sites. This type of permit takes half as long to process and costs half as much.
“Administrative is good, but the problem is, how do you get to that last mile, the residential areas?” said Paul O’Boyle, a lawyer for Crown Castle. “The city’s preference for street lights is too limiting,” he said. “We don’t need fewer facilities, we need more of them.”
With “new demand in neighborhoods, traffic centers, and downtown, macro facilities aren’t the best way to do that,” Paul said. The city prefers sites it can batch administratively without a permit, as officials have been doing in commercial zones. But for residential areas, the carriers are waiting on the ordinance “because it allows” 90 percent of them “to go administratively forward.”
June 8, 2017
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