FCC tells appeals court if electric or cable companies can install “larger, uglier, blighted” equipment on poles, then wireless carriers can too

11 February 2020 by Steve Blum
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Small cell olympic blvd 22oct2019

The Federal Communications Commission defended its 2018 preemption of local property ownership and permitting authority in front of a panel of three federal appeals court judges in Pasadena yesterday. Its lawyers faced some pointed questions from the judges.

FCC attorney Scott Noveck tried to dance around the reality of the FCC’s preemption order and claim that it really wasn’t doing much at all, particularly in regards to limits on the aesthetic requirements that cities can impose on wireless facilities. Judge Daniel Bress didn’t seem convinced…

Bress: The other side has raised this point, that when you just compare the standards – the one in the small cell order as compared to the one in the statute – there’s some possible misalignment, right, where it says no more burdensome, which would suggest parity, whereas the statute suggests actually there’s some amount of discrimination that would be allowed?"

Noveck: I think the order suggests parity among similarly situated infrastructure, which I think brings those into alignment.

Bress: What does that mean?

Noveck: Well, so for instance, the problem we have here sometimes, you have times when you have, say, cable equipment or electrical equipment, and what the record shows is that in many localities they were imposing very burdensome requirements on wireless equipment that might be smaller and less, um, more unobtrusive than similar equipment you might see on a utility pole or on a pole that was being used to provide cable service, was being used to provide electrical service but, for whatever reasons, localities were subjecting the wireless carriers to far more onerous requirements. So the non-discrimination principle here is just saying that if you are claiming that small cells need to meet some burdensome aesthetic requirements, but you’re allowing other utilities to put larger, uglier, blighted infrastructure on the same poles, it’s hard to think that this is a legitimate aesthetic requirement you’re imposing.

Noveck was trying to create a false equivalence between electrical equipment, such as transformers, that are installed on utility poles, which are often placed as far out of view as practicable, and wireless equipment placed on street light poles which, by their very nature, are placed where everyone can see them. Bress didn’t seem convinced, but that’s not necessarily his thinking – appeals court judges are notoriously (and properly) hard to read. All we can do now is wait for a ruling. There’s no particular timeline for that, but three to six months is typical.

Links to petitions, court documents and background material are here.