Broadband vs. NIMBY

by Tom Evslin

Question: Now that the funding for border-to-border no-residence-left-behind highspeed broadband access in Vermont is at hand, what could stop us from fulfilling our e-state dream? (see here for the good news on funding).

Answer: Us!

Question: How can we save us from ourselves?

Answer: Un-sunset 30 V.S.A. § 248a.

To understand this bureaucratic answer, read on.

The plan for extending highspeed broadband to every residence depends on radio links using next generation cellular technology called LTE. The technology will provide us mobile as well as fixed service through a single account. It will indubitably lead to improvements in coverage for cellular voice service as well. But there's a catch. The base radios for this service – like all cellular services – need antennas mounted above interference. Although some of these antennas can go on public buildings and in places like church steeples, many if not most of them will have to be placed on towers. And most of these towers will be new. If we already had towers in the unserved parts of the state, those parts of the state wouldn't be unserved.

The towers can't be invisible or they won't work. At a minimum, the antennas need to be mounted twenty feet above the tree tops. If there are multiple service providers on a tower, which we hope there will be, the antennas for each service need to be separated by ten vertical feet. In general the tops of towers will be forty feet or more above the tree tops. Towers in high places are also a good thing from a communication point of view and high places aren't invisible either.

Although most people in a given area will be happy with new service, it is inevitable that some of those with the best views of the towers aren't going to want to have towers built in their view. NIMBY – Not In My BackYard syndrome – is a fact of human nature; it's not unique to Vermont. But those who oppose projects of any kind have learned how to use Vermont law – particularly Act 250 review by District Commissions and local zoning reviews – to impose very long and often fatal delays on projects.

Remember, the federal stimulus money awarded to Vermont Telephone (VTEL), the Vermont Telecommunications Authority (VTA), and others must be spent within three years! If these projects are unreasonably delayed, they may literally never get done.

When the Vermont legislature enacted Governor Douglas' e-state proposal in 2007, it recognized the danger that NIMBY poses to execution of this ambitious plan. To assure that tower-building didn't get unreasonably delayed, it allowed applicants for projects of three or more towers to go to the Public Service Board (PSB) rather than District Commissions for approval and set strict timelines for hearings. Moreover, local jurisdiction over these projects was preempted by this new 248a process. The 248a process was deliberately modeled after the procedure used by the PSB for electric utility projects. To oversimplify, Act 250 review considers only the negative aspect of a project including aesthetic impact (towers aren't invisible); 248a review requires the PSB to minimize impact BUT allows for the reasonable mitigation of impact by the public good that comes from a project (you need towers to get coverage).

Town by town review of multi-tower projects would be impossible. If one town insisted on re-siting one tower, than other towers would have to move to avoid coverage gaps and the project would start all over again. The 248a single review of the whole project by the PSB solves that problem.

But the whole authorization for 248a reviews expires (sunsets) July 1, 2011 – just when we're likely to need it most. Very simply, execution of our e-state plan for border-to-border broadband and cellular access depends on the next legislature and the next administration cooperating on a bill to removes the sunset clause. The language is as simple as "30 V.S.A. § 248a(i) is hereby repealed." This should happen in January at the start of the new legislative session so that project planners will know that they can become project builders in a reasonably short time. We have a lot to do and we can't let NIMBY stop us.

 

 

Comments

[Lazarus Long]

"We have a lot to do and we can't let NIMBY stop us." Tell that to the Circumfrential Highway.

Don't you just love the equal application of The Law of Unintended Conseuences?

[Ed G. Mann]

At no time should any tax/funding law ever be able to be "un-sunsetted". A new proposed tax/funding bill should be required stating precisely what for and how the money will be raise and used.

Furthermore all revenue bills should go before the electorate once a year for an up or down vote on each individual bill.

Of course, this would mean dedicated tax lines and budgets, something Gov. Dean decried as restricting government's ability to spend.

EXACTLY!
Restricting, not preventing spending, in this state, a very necessary collar.
It's isn't the government's money!

[Tom Evslin]

Lazarus:

The Circ was already an old plan in 1981-2 when I was Secretary of Transportation in Vermont. A big part of my education in the ability of objectors to impose infinite delay and near infinite cost on a project at no cost to themselves.

[Tom Evslin]

Ed:

I should have been clearer but I am only asking to remove the sunset on 248a approval - make it permanent.

There is no funding of any kind in this part of Vermont statute.

[GreggB]

Nimbyism is the culture of VT. Just changing a law or two will not change that or allow anything to be done.

[Tom Evslin]

GreggB:

NIMBYism is a part of human nature. The difference in Vermont is that our laws make it too easy for NIMBY to prevail. Changing those laws will, in my opinion, make all the difference.

[Tom Licata]

So, Tom, are you in favor of "changing" Act 250?

And, if so, what would be one or two of your major reforms of Act 250?:

"But those who oppose projects of any kind have learned how to use Vermont law – particularly Act 250 review by District Commissions and local zoning reviews – to impose very long and often fatal delays on projects."

[Tom Evslin]

Tom:

The 248a review process is, in effect, a change to Act 250.

But, speaking purely for myself, yes - I do think Act 250 needs changing. It's been effective in many ways; it is now to open to gaming by those who'd like to kill projects. happens when laws are around too long.

Specifically I would require that public good be considered mitigation of detrimental effects and impose much stricter timelines for review. Not at all sure this is all - I haven't reviewed the whole law in a while - but these are two areas I know need improvement.

[GreggB]

Tom if you change one or two of the nimby laws you still have to push your project past all of the nimby gatekeepers in various public positions. VT isn't going to go cutting its public and nonprofit(public$) sector that have grown up to enforce the nimbylaws. It is ingrained culture in VT. Changing a law or two will not change the way things get done in VT. Besides the pols know their constituents they aren't motivated to disenfranchise their 'protest class' supporters by ending any nimby rights.

[Tom Licata]

Thanks, Tom.

But, your statement that "The 248a review process is, in effect, a change to Act 250," is something I don't agree with.

The 248a review process is ONLY a "carve-out," a built-in exception to the rule of Act 250. It is a way for those in power to subvert an existing law; without dealing with the fundamental problem of that law, that being Act 250.

Tell me if I'm wrong, because I'm writing from memory, but I believe I read that the renewable energy bill that recently passed also carved-out a by-pass; where renewable project go right to the PSB for approval and examination. If not the PSB, it was some other alternative by-pass to Act 250.

My point is that we seem to pick our "winners" and "losers" when it comes to who and what projects go before Act 250.

This is not fair, predictable nor timely to our “losers,” losers defined as those not deemed “favored” by Vermont’s power brokers.

Rather than continuously deal with the symptom of this problem, where is the political will to deal with the actual problem?

Until this is dealt with - and what I mean by “this” is a respect for property rights and ones' ability to conduct business in a free and open society - Vermont's economy will continue to wither on the vine.

As well intentioned as the supporters of Act 250 are, they have and will continue to impoverish this state and its citizens, as witnessed by the many job and economic statistics too numerous to list here, but well known by the many readers on this site.

I view this opposition to business and lack of respect for property rights (via Act 250) as selfish, self-centered and unsustainable, as “those in the cart outweigh those pulling.”

It’s all just unsustainable.

[Tom Evslin]

Tom:

It's hard to argue with your logic here. The 248 process is a carve-out because we couldn't afford to have all utility work held up indefinitely. And this does demonstrate the need for a broader fix to Act 250 itself.

I'm not going to stop pushing to make 248a permanent because I'm afraid we won't make fixes to act 250 itself fast enough to proceed with our telecommunications buildout. Perhaps, optimistically, success in a carve-out will demonstrate the value of broader reform.

[Ralph Colin]

While I fully agree with both Tom
Evslin and Tom Licata thar there needs to be periodic reviews of and revisions to Act 250 as there were about four or five years ago, what most critics of the Act 250 process don't realize is that many of the unfair and unreasonable delays in the permitting process are not caused at the Act 250 level, but rather emanate from town plans and/or the reviews at the local level, i.e, Zoning Boards of Approval and Development Review Boards, even before the applications may come to the District Commissions of the Natural Resources Board.

In the eight years that I have served on the District Commission #8 (in Bennington County), we have not disapproved any application and virtually all of the applications have been approved within thirty days of the date of orginal submission. Yes, we do frequently require that certain conditions be made to satisfy the the criteria found in Act 250, but I can't recall any applicant who has found either the criteria or the changes which our Commission has required to be unreasonable.

There have been a number of instances where the various agencies of the Administration (ANR, AOT, etc.)have demanded that
certain aspects of plans submitted by applicants be modified prior to the permits being awarded and in a very few such cases, the delays can be significant, but normally we
are able to issue Land Use Permits within 30 - 45 days after receiving applications.

However, I am familiar with the fact that it sometimes (often?)takes local boards months, if not years in some cases, to approve
applications for Land Use Permits.
That is something over which the state really has no control and it is in those such cases where NIMBYism is most frequently found.

Act 60 didn't help that matter at all. As it requires that education taxes be assessed on a community based on the size of its Grand List, it offers town fathers the opportunity to discourage building permits for projects which might significantly add to the Grand List total. That's another issue which should be revisited, particularly at times like we are currently experiencing
when our economy could use a boost
by increasing the number of businesses which we encourage to
locate in our state. Act 60 works
against that objective to a far greater degree than does Act 250.

[Vermonter for Liberty]

Why is Tom always on Vermont Tiger pushing federally-aided programs? Just like TARP, border-to-border broadband is a boondoggle waiting to happen. I've never been a NIMBY supporter in my life but if by doing so I can stop the waste of taxpayer's money, where do I climb on board?

I can't believe he's arguing for destroying the skyline to reach a few people up at the end of the road who already have other options and will have more within a few years.

Sorry, I'll take a free-market solution any day.

[Dennis Lukas]

This sounds like a little slight of hand on this whole proposal.You do not need towers for broad band.MCI layed enough fiber optic cable all ready to make broad band possible with out towers.Is this broad band propasal billing for the miles of fiber optic cable MCI all ready installed? Sounds like the cellular phone companies are getting a free ride at the expense of the tax payers.THERE IS NO REASON FOR TOWERS....-0- .

[Tom Evslin]

Vermonter:

A not insignificant part of the reason why the free market has NOT provided good cellular and mobile data connectivity in Vermont is the difficulty of getting permits. Add to this low population density and tough geography and why bother with Vermont?

It's a shame that Stimulus is almost the only game in town for rural telecom investment the last couple of years; but, as long as it is, I'm glad Vermont got funded there. Our tax dollars - or debt in our name - was going to fund telecom somewhere whether we claimed a share or not.

Should this system be reformed? sure. Should we fix our permitting process? Yes. But one fix doesn't have to wait for the other.

[G. Cross]

Ralph, Thanks for your thoughtful comments re; Act 250. It has been my observation that it is local boards and the NIMBY folks who have held up most projects, not Act 250. Take a look at the recent housing project in Shelburne.

[Tom Evslin]

Dennis:

I'm sorry but you simply don't know what you're talking about. There is some fiber in Vermont; there will soon be a lot more. But, except in Burlington (is that what you want to replicate?) and Springfield (private investment by VTEL), that fiber doesn't reach the last few miles to houses or small businesses. A conservative estimate of the cost to bring fiber to every Vermont structure is $1 billion.

Radios - on towers - take signal the last miles from the fiber network to people's homes and businesses. It does not duplicate what existing fiber does.

Crucially, radio-supplied broadband is mobile - works in your backyard, in your car, and in your boat. It's tough to trail a fiber around everywhere you go.

[Tom Evslin]

Ralph:

Thank you for your very helpful elaboration on the Act 250 process. 248a replaces both the local review and District Commissions so is a solution.

I appreciate you taking the trouble to spell all this out.

[Mike Bernhardt]

Ralph has stated what is also true to be fact for the District 2 Commission that I have chaired these past years. We have a commission policy that all cell towers are to be treated as minors at the outset and only called to a hearing if request by an appropriate party. The issue with Act 250 is the lack of specificity of certain criteria, which opens the issues to subjectivity and not objectivity.

[Dennis Lukas]

Tom you really should look at were MCI put the cables. And you were first talking about bringing broad band to homes and businesses, know your talking about mobile.If there is such a demand for this, why has no private company invested in this?

[Daniel Foty]

Tom, for today I won't go into the continuing overhanging problem that the due diligence on this plan seems to be incredibly deficient. How exactly will "broadband everywhere" cause a huge economic change for the better? Is paying for it all via one layer of debt after another (with no idea of how it will ever be paid back) a sensible idea? And (as has been asked) once all the "grants" have been exhausted, what will happen when the end-user charges have to be based on the true costs of deployment and operation?

But we may have a much bigger problem (if that's conceivable).

From what I'm reading, the plan is to deploy "ubiquitous broadband" via what amounts to a gussied-up mobile telephony network.

At the macro-scale, I work in wireless communications technologies all over the world - and to the best of my knowledge, no one anywhere has yet been able to actually get such a system to work properly - despite a great deal of effort.

The last time I encountered a plan like this was late last year in Kenya. When I was in Nairobi, the telecomm and government officials I met with told me that they had thought that a nationwide 3G network would be a suitable vehicle to push broadband data networking to every corner of Kenya. (Sound familiar?) But as they tried to do it, they quickly found that this sort of network architecture and network topology just doesn't scale up very nicely; networks of that sort easily become overwhelmed (see below). They also found that the power consumption (at both ends) quickly grew to crippling proportions.

We can already see this domestically - all you have to do is go to New York City or San Francisco. Even though the networks there aren't designed for large-scale broadband traffic, they're already collapsing under the weight of the demands of just mobile device users; during the middle of the day (roughly 11am - 4pm, based on personal experience), even though you have signal you can't do anything. Never mind getting your e-mail; you can't even make a phone call.

When you get to specific technologies, the picture gets even bleaker. Basically, in recent years the wireless data realm has witnessed the spectacular flame-out of one highly-touted technology after another. Despite all the tweaking and renaming, it's all due to the same basic set of problems - that wireless technology (as presently and historically configured) was never designed to handle vast amounts of data traffic, even modest data traffic overwhelms networks (keep in mind that in NYC and SF, most of the data traffic is going over wired connections - and the peripheral wireless data network is *still* overwhelmed), the networks collapse pretty quickly when trying to serve multiple users, and the power consumption (at both ends) becomes excessive.

That last is pretty intriguing. One thing I've been able to show about all of these wireless technologies is that despite the notion that somehow the continual application of band-aids is helping, the basic reality is that the amount of wattage used to transmit one bit has remained about constant - over time and across multiple technologies. The notion of "clever" methods of increasing bandwidth is a mirage - the underlying reality is that higher data rates are based on higher power consumption.

The alphanumeric soup of things that have underachieved is long and messy. If we had been having this conversation two or three years back, everyone would have been chanting "WiMAX! WiMAX! WiMAX!" That flopped because (get this) you can't magically push high data rates over long distances - without either burning a lot of power or being forced to deploy a lot more network nodes (closer together).... both of which defeat the purpose and drive the costs way up.

Every other "new" ("This time. Really!") wireless data technology of that past 10 - 15 years has followed the same well-worn path.

Unfortunately, LTE is cut from the same cloth. Right now, it has the advantage of not really existing yet - so it's easy for anyone to wave their arms around and make great claims for it. But like all the others, it's almost certain to grossly underachieve (physics always wins over hype) and perhaps be as undeployable as WiMAX (and others).

The basic problem with these serial failures is that they can only "work" by flying in the face of Shannon Information Theory - which is a second-tier way of saying that they require the repeal of the second law of thermodynamics.

After seeing this news, I bounced the notion of LTE off of a veteran (30+ years) telecomm executive (mostly CEO level) that I work with. His reaction was that LTE is just the latest phantom wireless technology that is being pitched via numbers that reflect desired outcomes rather than real technological capabilities. His take is that the performance will be perhaps about 1/10th of the sales pitches (even under optimum conditions), and that like nearly all wireless technologies (reflecting their history in voice traffic) it might work great for ONE user at a time but will collapse very quickly under any sharing.

The notion of "wireless last mile" has been kicking around for at least 15 years - it sounds great, but it's just not that straightforward. And unless it has been well-hidden, I have yet to see a viable working (with speed) deployment anywhere in the world.

I could go on for a long time here about the needs and potential of GENUINELY next-generation wireless networks (which is what I work on), but that's beyond the scope of this little discussion.

If we're going to pin our hopes for this on an unproven technology with no explicit track record and a structure that looks very much like all the other serial flops of the past decade, we're likely going to find that we'll have littered the landscape with gear that will end up being next door to worthless. And the debts incurred to do this will still be there.

[Cheshire Cat]

I hate to see what the monthly service fee is going to be for this. Knock out wire with an ice storm, you string wire. Fiber optics you spend time welding each connection, not cheap. Private enterprise may have had a problem with permits but the ROE really was the nut. That's not return on investment but return OF investment.

Right now there are places in Middlebury where cable won't go because there isn't enough potential subscribers. Wait until the subscription costs hit Maidstone or Granby.
What's that going to cost a household for being able to send Molly that big .jpg of cousin Petunia.

[Dennis Lukas]

Thank You Mr.Foty for clarifying LTE and ubiquitous broadband. As a electrician I see the broadband infrastructure as coax to fiber.Vermonts topography would make Toms plan a nightmare.One mile might equal 3 towers, unless we locate them high up,like windmills,witch evokes,NIMBY.
Lets not mention natures majoir killers,ice,wet snow or lightning.I could just imagine Toms smart grid linked to the LTE system.
The field of dreams mentality has to stop in this country and let private business unsubsidized by government get on with the business of business.

[Lazarus Long]

Daniel - your 8:26 PM post was extremely illuminating. For the past xx months every time I heard a public figure tout E-This or E-That as our economic savior I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Some how I had the perception that they were talking-without-knowing. Just more unicorn and rainbow magic. This only goes to further demonstrate that Gov't needs to get out of the way and stop promising that which it cannot deliver - and may be impossible to deliver (at least under the current conditions).

[Vermonter for Liberty]

"It's a shame that Stimulus is almost the only game in town for rural telecom investment the last couple of years; but, as long as it is, I'm glad Vermont got funded there. Our tax dollars - or debt in our name - was going to fund telecom somewhere whether we claimed a share or not."
- Tom Evslin

The shame is that people up in Montpelier, whether Republican or Democrat, are so welded to the Federal teat that they can't imagine any other world than Keep on Sucking.

Dennis Steele is looking better and better....