Sprint Tells FCC: Tribal Siting Costs Are Rising Quickly

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The FCC opened a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in order to ease wireless infrastructure siting barriers, Inside Towers reported. Now, Sprint gives us an inside look at what it paid to deploy small cells around Houston’s NRG Stadium for the Super Bowl. The company considers tribal siting costs to be spiraling out of control and suggests the agency review those.

Sprint paid more than $173,000 to deploy a total of 23 small cell sites around the stadium to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act. Filings to the FCC suggest costs were imposed on carriers by the city of Houston or the Texas Historical Commission, says Sprint in an FCC filing. But actually, the figures Sprint referenced were imposed by federal law, not state or local historic reviews, the carrier clarifies.

“Sprint was not attempting to disparage the City of Houston or suggest that the City of Houston had imposed improper fees,” the company states in its filing. “To the contrary, Sprint’s concern was, and continues to be, that the tribal historic review process under the National Historic Preservation Act [NHPA] imposes excessive costs and delays on wireless deployment with few corresponding benefits.”  

For the NRG stadium build, Sprint paid fees through its contractors to a dozen Indian Tribal Nations as part of the NHPA. The City of Houston reviewed Sprint’s applications “in a timely manner” and “as the mayor pointed out, imposed reasonable fees.”

Under the FCC’s implementation of NHPA, the carrier must consult with any Tribal Nation that expresses interest in projects in a particular county or state, even when the construction of the wireless support structure and antenna will occur on private property or property owned by the government, and not on tribal lands. The fees ranged from $200 to the Tonkawa Tribe to $1,500 to the Kiowa Indian Tribe of Oklahoma.

The tribes wanted $6,850 per site, says Sprint. When the cost of paying the fees charged by contractors to coordinate the tribal review and process fees are added, the total expense for complying with the tribal review was $7,535 per site, which came to a total of $173,305 for the 23 sites.

Sprint outlined the tribal costs for the NRG stadium project as an example of the “increasing economic burden” of the process, noting that it has paid millions in such fees over the last 13 years and no Tribe has ever asked for a consultation with Sprint or its contractors on the grounds that a proposed tower or antenna would have an adverse effect on a historic property. It could pay “tens of millions more” as small cell deployments increase, unless the FCC reforms the process.

“Tribal Nations are continuing to demand higher fees and designate larger and larger areas of interest,” says Sprint. “At present, there are no constraints on the amount of fees a Tribal Nation may require or the geographic areas for which it can require payment for review. The tribal historic review process remains in place even in situations—such as utility rights-of-way—where the Commission has exempted state historic review.”

May 23, 2017         

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