A tower site jumps through a lot of hoops before reaching to the sky. A site acquisition team needs to find a suitable piece of real estate, negotiate a lease or purchase with the landlord and move the site through zoning and permitting with the local jurisdiction. A survey is completed, and a civil engineering team creates the construction drawings for the tower, including site plan grading and stormwater controls. A geotechnical group analyzes the soil to establish the foundation requirements. Additionally, an environmental team ensures the site meets all environmental and regulatory requirements including National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). All these tasks must be done in the correct order of operations to ensure compliance before construction begins.
Tower Engineering Professionals (TEP) provides all these services, and more, in-house. “We have employees on staff providing all these services, which are commonly handled by different vendors,” said Tom Egan, who serves TEP as the Vice President of Site Development Services. “We provide all the front end services required up to the issuance of the notice to proceed and release of the tower for construction.”
TEP started off as an inspection and structural engineering company back in 1997 and added the regulatory and civil groups almost immediately in 1998. “Over time, we added different services as the market demanded it,” Egan said. In 2006, TEP added a geotechnical division, implementing its own in-house lab for analyzing the soil samples from the site. In 2008, TEP Design Build was established to solidify its construction presence in the market.
Egan, who has 20+ years of telecom experience in project management and site acquisitions, joined TEP in August 2017 when it acquired Egan Realty Services, Inc. where he served as founder and CEO. The addition of Egan Realty gave TEP the final piece it needed to complete the spectrum of Site Development Services.
“The reason we brought Site Development Services in-house was because the customers wanted that approach. They wanted to have the ability to work with one point of contact throughout the development process,” Egan said. “The carriers realized that having to manage all of these different vendors separately was a burden.”
Today, TEP provides everything needed for carriers, tower companies, WISPs and others to develop a site for a telecommunications tower. From site acquisition, zoning and permitting to land surveying, environmental resources, engineering, construction, fiber, inspections, modifications, and RF design services.
There can be several changes to the site during a municipality’s zoning process, which requires a lot of back and forth between vendors providing regulatory, permitting and civil engineering services. “When different vendors handle certain aspects of site development, information has to pass through a lot more hands, which lengthens and sometimes complicates the process,” Egan said.
Working together in-house, the disciplines, especially civil engineering and site acquisition, are aligned. Additional services are ordered in a timely fashion, with follow ups to ensure the requests are completed.
“Our customers get one point of contact and that person manages, internally, all of the different disciplines that are working on their project,” Egan said. “Once you experience the streamlined processes of our in-house, turnkey site acquisition department working side-by-side with our civil engineering, geo, survey, environmental and regulatory groups, you’ll see the benefit of our a streamlined process that gets your site constructed faster and with less issues.”
TEP boasts 75+ engineers, 250+ certified climbers and 800+ employees, working across all 50 states as well as a number of US Territories, Canada and Caribbean countries. To learn more about its repertoire of offerings, please visit: https://tepgroup.net/.
For more information about Site Development Services at TEP, contact Tom Egan at [email protected].
By J. Sharpe Smith, Inside Towers Technology Editor
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