[1st-mile-nm] CTCNet: Small Cell Siting Costs

[Richard Lowenberg]

Documenting the True—and High—Local Administrative Costs of Small Cell 
Siting

http://www.ctcnet.us/blog/documenting-the-true-and-high-local-administrative-costs-of-small-cell-siting

Shawn Thompson, Principal Engineer

A hundred bucks. That’s what the FCC recently decided is adequate 
compensation to your locality for processing a small cell application. 
In many cases, it’s not going to be enough.

And if your actual costs are indeed higher than $100, you will 
effectively be forced by the new FCC rules to subsidize the 
telecommunications industry—unless you can build a strong and reasonable 
case for why your actual, documented costs are higher and should be 
recovered by your community.

With the January 14 effective date looming for the new FCC order 
preempting local authority over small cell siting, we recently outlined 
Ten Strategies that your locality, state agency, or utility can adopt in 
this newly restrictive environment. We later described how careful 
processes are your best defense.

We turn now to the question of costs. The FCC set low default wireless 
facilities siting application fees that localities can charge: $500 for 
up to five sites; $100 per site thereafter; and recurring fees in the 
rights-of-way limited to $270 per site per year. But the FCC also allows 
you to charge a “reasonable approximation” of your “objectively 
reasonable costs.”

Let’s remember that these technologies will be dotting the landscape for 
decades, so doing this right is worthwhile. We at CTC have been 
assisting public agencies and utilities on wireless facilities siting 
for a long time—long enough to know that the FCC’s numbers are low 
relative to most actual costs.

So lately we’ve been documenting exactly what “reasonable” looks like. 
This means sitting down with clients to detail what a proper application 
and review process consists of, and how long each task consumes in staff 
time and other expenses. (And no, we aren’t including consulting in the 
calculation.) We’ve built highly detailed spreadsheets documenting all 
this. Bottom line: We have found that in some cases a new siting might 
cost north of $1,500 for a proper review.

(snip)



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Richard Lowenberg, Executive Director
1st-Mile Institute     505-603-5200
Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504,
rl at 1st-mile.org     www.1st-mile.org
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