News and Press
Releases
May 2, 2005
Wireless Week.com
Tower Companies Building State
Associations
By Mark Rockwell
NASHVILLE, Tenn.--A group of tower management
companies and wireless carriers are set to
unveil a new tool for the tower industry that
will help them counter a number of issues
facing the industry, primarily how to work
with local governments in tower
placement.
The group, with guidance from PCIA and tower
management company AAT Communications, will
unveil a Website today that will provide free
documentary resources and advice that the
tower industry and wireless carriers can use
to build state wireless associations. The
effort, dubbed the State Wireless Association
Program (SWAP), and Website --
www.swaprogram.net. -- will provide not only a
free, step-by-step guide in establishing a
state wireless association, but also will
offer necessary organization documentation,
like incorporation, by-laws and mission
statements to get a local association up and
running. It also will tap the experiences of
three existing state wireless associations in
Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee, where the
first three groups have been operating for the
past few years.
The idea already is spreading. Florida
companies recently began their own state
association and groups of wireless carriers
and tower companies in North Carolina, South
Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi are
forming their own state associations using the
SWAP model, say officials associated with the
effort.
SWAP's idea is to open the initial
Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee
associations' experience for other
companies operating in other states to use in
their quests to get new towers approved by an
increasingly complex and restrictive thicket
of local ordinances, according to Patricia
Tant, vice president of sales and marketing at
AAT Communications.
Although the program has been shepherded by
Tant at AAT and PCIA is providing Web
facilities and resources, neither controls the
state associations. "We're not PCIA,
or CTIA," says Andrew Rotenstreich,
attorney at the Birmingham, Ala., law firm of
Haskell Slaughter, Young & Rediker.
Rotenstreich helped form the Alabama Wireless
Association. He says the SWAP program is meant
to help spread the word on what can work and
what doesn't work in working with local
governments on the sometimes volatile issue of
wireless tower siting.
The Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee state
wireless associations have provided the
foundation for other tower companies and
wireless carriers to build on, says Hunter
Stuart, district manager for Crown Castle
International's Western Tennessee/Arkansas
operations. The programs in those states have
produced smoother relations between competing
carriers in getting tower facilities built and
have improved relationships between previously
fractious and competing carriers and tower
operators, he adds.
The idea, Stuart says, is to unify tower
companies and carriers' voice at the local
level, countering arguments against tower
placement at municipal zoning boards. The
association in Tennessee has helped craft a
bill currently moving through the state
legislature that would codify statewide
guidelines for how wireless towers could be
placed and the consulting fees that outside
entities could charge local governments to
study the facility's construction. Both
are big issues for tower placement, but until
recently, companies have been protective of
their practices in working with local
governments and with other companies. As the
necessity of sharing space on towers and sites
has become critical for carriers and tower
companies, however, those practices are best
shared, as everyone involved will benefit, he
says -- including local governments that want
better wireless coverage but are sometimes
reluctant to approve new towers.
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