[telecom] Need some guidance on telecom easements [Telecom]

This certainly wouldn't be in our way, but years ago we were offered

> about *$15K PER YEAR fo*r the right to erect a communications tower.
> We agreed, but succumbed to community political pressure, and the deal
> never went through.  Now this is on an existing utility pole and it's
> only a one-time fee. Is it fair? Any pitfalls?  TIA for your help.

As others pointed out, get a good lawyer familiar with this sort of thing.

Unfortunately, the fees and qualifications of professionals vary quite a bit so you may wish to talk to several lawyers to get an idea of their actual experience, what they will do for you, and how much will they charge.

You mentioned community opposition. I don't know your circumstances, but that is an issue that needs to be considered. If you allow something that the community objects to, it may not be worth be the income.

We had a little group of stores where the property owner allowed a cell tower to go up in the rear of hte property. The community was furious and it hurt business in the stores and the owner's standing in town.

Classic NIMBY thinking. I bet the community spread the news of the eyesore by using cellphones.

I may not like the way celltowers dot the landscape next to all the interstate highways, but I don't choose to object, because I'm the first to make use of them when I have a flat or my "check engine" light comes on.

And every city slicker who buys 50 acres in the outland wants to put up a fence and keep everyone else from doing the same: provided, of course, that they don't have to drive more than 30 minutes to get to the airport and they always have a good signal on "their" network.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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I have a house in the mountains of Riverside, Calif, that I use on weekends and other times. It sites on about 10 acres and is at the end of a long road. Some years ago I was approached by Sprint about putting a site on my land, in the back. They would make it look like trees on the property.

I argeed to it with some stipulations. It took a bit to get it approved since it required 4 different government agencies and a public forum. The big complaint was the tower and the radiation that came from it. The people up there had been complaining about spotty service for some years; but it was not in my backyard. It was approved and built. The tower really can't be seen from the road and not my house, but you can see it should you fly over.

I now get $1500 a month for it, plus free hand sets for 3 lines and unlimited services; it is a good deal for me and now there are no complaints about service. Verizon approached me a couple of years later and we agreed a system there, they worked with Sprint about tower sharing and that was agreed to, with a small hut for Sprint in the same area, no problems with the agencies or the neighbors this time. I get $1000 for that each month and if I want phones the same, I have not taken them up on it yet though.

AT&T now wants to do the same thing, [but] at this point I'm not going forward with it for many reasons. One, I don't want another tower on the lot and if I did this that part of the property could be considered as a Radio Farm and cause me property tax problems. The companies pay tax on their towers, right now I just pay tax on the income, nothing changed on the value of the property; if anything it has gone down in value because of the tower.

Besides, people around me might burn me out.

Those who own hilltop vacation retreats are often finding themselves sitting on a gold mine, as cellular and other telecoms reach further into the hinterlands. I know a ham operator in Maine who bought a hilltop location because he wanted good signals for ham radio: now, he makes a respectable living renting out tower space.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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At the time not many people had cellphones.

The tower was very ugly as built. At the time it was built, widespread [use of] cellphones were still yet to come.

There [were a lot of] zoning laws which the tower violated.

The town didn't appreciate the way the cellphone carrier muscled its way in. IIRC, the tower as built was taller than claimed. The base enclosre surrounded by barbed wire wasn't exactly attractive. The carrier claimed, falsely, that it was a public utility and as such had a right (granted by Federal law which superceded local law) to do as it pleased. Except of course when it was the carrier's advantage to claim to be a free market company and not subject to standard regulatory practices. This was a common practice after divestiture -- the new companies that sprung [up] claimed whichever format (regulated or free market) was to their advantage in a given situation.

This tower wasn't next to an Interstate highway, it was in the middle of a small village. At that time the village had plenty of pay phones in real booths. If your vehicle failed in the village you would've easily found a phone to call for help, as well as a few service garages. It's the sort of place where if you went into any store you'd be allowed to use the store's phone for an emergency local call.

I should point out when the Baby Bell company serving our town needed to expand it's C.O., it did so by consulting local leaders and working out a design and plan that preserved some historic structures nearby (originally, they would've been torn down by the expansion), and the expansion architecture harmonized with the town. Note that the company did not have to do any of those things, as the regulated landline carrier it truly did have special powers. Plus, it's C.O. is not open to the public and making it nice doesn't increase their business at all.

Well, my apologies for disparaging your utopia. I was an engineer, not a landscape architect, and that has always affected my opinions on these matters.

Building towers higher than people thought you would is the oldest trick in the game: the erectors know that local officials aren't going to climb up to measure, and that people around it will believe anything they're told. When we were kids, my brother once showed a building inspector how to measure the heigh of a tower by it's shadow (something all Boy Scouts are taught), and he earned a free ice cream for doing it (back when ice cream was precious and sought after by hungry boys).

It seemed the tower had "accidentally" gotten about fifty feet higher than was planned. I never found out how it was resolved, but I never forgot my brother grinning at me while he ate that damned ice cream. ;-)

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

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Michael Muderick wrote in :

On our land is an electric company utility pole. One of the
> communications carriers wants to put some antennas on that pole,

Lots of good advice in the replies. I'd like to say: maybe you could let us know what the end result is.

A summary of this thread could also be an interesting article for the telecom-digest website.

Koos van den Hout

Speaking of the web site, I just noticed that my RSS to Yahoo for the digest has not been working for six months.

I abandoned the Yahoo groups some time ago: updating them took too much time, and it duplicated the nntp and email feeds avavailable from Usenet and the Majordomo robot, respectively.

Pat used to assemble the daily digest by hand, and send them to email subscribers after he did so. That process, which probably dated from the start of the digest, didn't use any of the tools availalbe today, and the first thing I did after taking on the temporary moderator job was to set about lessening the work load so that I could concentrate on essentials.

I've always thought that the best way to moderate a list like the Digest is to use automation as much as possible, and to that end, I've pared the distribution down to the minimum that gives readers the same choices that they had before: reading the digest via Usenet, or getting emails. In addition, the Majordomo robot that handles the email distribution has been modified to give readers the option of getting either individual posts, or the traditional digest, whereas before the only choice for email subscribers was to get the digest version.

If RSS offers advantages that email subsciptions do not, I'm willing to be convinced that I should reenable the Yahoo feeds. However, it will only happen if I can gateway posts to Yahoo without manual effort, for the reasons stated.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never see your post! Thanks!

We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the digest, you don't need to change anything.

I set up an RSS link from the one Pat gave me, it has nothing to do with their groups, it is on my page there, I get news the same way. One day it just stopped working, it seemed right after Pat got sick, but not sure. I have not tried to set it up on another site, I read it most of the time from my newsreader. I was looking for a posting I made some years ago and did a Google search and found one I posted to the digest in 1993, talk about strange seeing the old digest.

I don't know enough about RSS to help with this: others please chime in.

Bill Horne Temporary Moderator

Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never see your post! Thanks!

We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the digest, you don't need to change anything.

If a lot of people want an RSS feed, it could be arranged using a variant of the software I use for comp.compilers, but I'd rather that people take advantage of the existing usenet and mail feeds.

R's, John