2023-08-16 WBI Town Hall on Federal Bills

On August 16, 2023, Wired Broadband, Inc. (WBI) and BBILAN co-sponsored a Town Hall focusing on the over 80 federal bills working their way through the U.S. Congress. These bills are the wireless telecom’s wish list of everything they want to accelerate the proliferation of cell towers pretty much anywhere they want, with no opportunity to even know they’re coming, let alone do anything about trying to stop them.

Watch the Town Hall recording

Read the Town Hall transcript

Brief Summary of Presenter Comments
by Julian Gresser

Andrew Campanelli

The net result of HR 3557 and the collection of over 50+ related bills is to cripple the power of cities, counties, towns, villages, and even states to regulate anything to do with cell tower applications. If passed, states and local communities will have zero power to regulate in any way the placement of wireless facilities on public or private property.

In New York City, if someone files an application to install 12,000 small wireless facilities, how could anyone reasonably expect the permitting authority to make a decision in 90 days?  There is no legitimate purpose for adopting something like this. It is just inherently insidious.

Scott McCollough 

This bill and its related bills represent almost everything that telecoms could want.

The telecoms wrote it. You can tell just from looking at it. If you’ve looked at enough legislation, this is not something some staffer wrote. This is not something somebody in Congress was assigned to do. The lobbyists wrote this bill and found somebody to sponsor it. So let’s just make that clear, at the outset.

HR 3557 basically eliminates any existing restrictions in land use laws. Many local jurisdictions have laws that say, for example, in residential areas, you can have a commercial facility, which is what a wireless cell tower is. This bill says: amend your zoning law, or you must grant a variance. It will enable taking private property without adequate compensation. It overrides years of land use precedent and practice. It even implicitly overrules state government Sunshine laws, because no local jurisdiction can meet these deadlines, and still do what you have to do under the Open Meetings Act. There are significant Commerce Clause separation of powers questions: first, fourth, fifth, seventh, ninth, tenth, 11th, and 14th Constitutional amendment problems. Yes, Congress has broad powers, but I don’t think Congress can treat us — the public — in this way.

Julian Gresser

 The blizzard of 50+ bills now before the U.S. Congress, beginning with HR 3557, taken together, will have the effect of fatally disempowering and stripping away Constitutional rights and prerogatives of local communities to protect and to secure their health, safety,  environment, privacy and basic wellbeing. The combined effect will be to cripple local resilience and interdependence, which are critical conditions for states and local communities to meet a host of environmental, cybersecurity, and other challenges.

 False Claims and Premises. The 50+ bills are based on a series of false claims and premises that are not rendered truthful by their being widely asserted, disseminated, and asseverated by the wireless telecom industry and members of Congress:

• Wireless infrastructure is safe. It is well documented to be unsafe.

• Wireless infrastructure is resilient. In fact, it is less resilient than one based on fiber.

• Wireless infrastructure is energy efficient. In fact, it is shown to be vastly energy consumptive.

• Wireless infrastructure is cybersecure. In fact, wireless is substantially less secure that optical fiber which facilitates identification of the point of attack, and resilient response.

• Wireless infrastructure is climate change friendly. In fact, it is the very opposite.

• Wireless infrastructure promotes Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) especially in minority communities, when in fact these same communities are too economically challenged and lack legal representation to escape.

• Wireless infrastructure will close the Digital Divide, when it caused it in the first place and will expand it.

• Wireless is long-lived, whereas the wireless industry and supporting legislators know full well that wireless is short-lived and given to early obsolescence.

 HR 3557 and its associated complementary bills represent a tyrannical attempt by the telecom-wireless industry to shift forever the reasonable and historic balance between the federal government, states, and local communities. Many of these bills offend the Constitution; some significantly abridge hard fought civil liberties; others intentionally and cynically promote and disseminate false claims, or are predicated on them. A few, building on the mayhem created by HR 3557, will jeopardize national security, especially by crippling resilience and interdependent emergency response at the state and local levels to cyberattacks.

 At the very least members of Congress must conduct comprehensive risk assessment and due diligence on HR 3557 et al. before voting to approve them. It is political malpractice to fail to do so.