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

A hundred bucks. That’s what the Federal Communications Commission 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.

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.

[Shawn Thompson is principal engineer at CTC Technolgy & Energy.]

[Joanne Hovis, President of CTC Technolgoy & Energy, is a board member of the Benton Foundation]