The Cellular-Emergency Alert Service Association, a volunteer organization dedicated to establishing emergency notification as a standard feature of digital wireless service, said it opposes a Senate bill that would remove federal pre-emption of antenna-siting moratoria.
According to Douglas Weiser, director of the organization, Senate Bill 1350 effectively would halt “the expansion of digital/personal communications services networks that are essential to bringing digital emergency alert service deployment to suburban and rural communities.”
C-EASa wants wireless carriers to invest in equipment that would be deployed at cell sites capable of warning a highly specific population of impending disasters. In order to provide site-specific-1/9 county-targeted warnings, however, wireless systems must be fully deployed, an effort hampered, said Weiser, by local municipalities throwing up barriers to tower siting.
The proposed legislation, introduced in October by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and James Jeffords (R-Vt.), would “amend section 332 of the Communications Act of 1934 to preserve state and local authority to regulate the placement, construction and modification of certain telecommunications facilities.”
Leahy, noting in the bill that commercial towers reduce the value of homes and destroy views, supported his bill saying, “I do not want Vermont turned into a giant pincushion with 200-foot towers indiscriminately sprouting on every mountain and in every valley.”
Cathy Bergman-Venezia, president of the EMR Alliance, a coalition of consumer activists concerned about the issue of telecommunications facility siting, said while safety is an important issue, the question of how it should be handled should be addressed by state and local governments.
“The federal government already has a lot on its plate. Why would it want more?” she asked. “They can’t eat what they’ve already got.”
Bergman-Venezia said state and local governments, rather than the Federal Communications Commission and federal government, are better able to handle citizen’s issues and concerns because they are more likely to understand local issues and respond in a timely manner.
“We as a community, or state, or county can decide what’s best for us,” she said. “We need to address it on a state level or local level.”
In its statement, C-EASa responded to bill supporters by saying, “We at C-EASa recognize the importance of local zoning control over private venture infrastructure. However, we assert that the basis of community resistance to the proliferation of towers is based mainly on the failure of the industry to demonstrate an understandable public benefit of digital/PCS telecommunications over the existing cellular `car phone’ product.”
C-EASa continued, “We hereby petition the United States Senate to consider an agreement by the PCS licensees to provide public warning as a standard feature of digital/PCS service, in voluntary compliance with the FCC’s emergency alert system-commercial broadcaster rules, as fulfillment of a recognized public benefits trust that is the fundamental basis of the federal pre-emption privileges granted by the Telecommunications Act of 1934.”
