Follow the Money

I've been fortunate to have some people just appear out of the blogosphere to help me with my research on this monopole issue. One of those people is Richard Colmi from the Center for Municipal Solutions. Someone who had read my blog postings suggested I contact their organization for help. This is an excerpt from their website http://telecomsol.com/about_us.html which describes their business:
"The Center for Municipal Solutions (CMS) is an organization that, since 1987, has been exclusively dedicated to serving local governments (municipalities and counties) and represents in excess of more than 500 communities in 23 states and the National Park Service.

The two founders have a combined total of more than a half century of experience (on the executive level) in the telecommunications industry. The members of the team of experts include Professional Engineers licensed in more than 40 states, including RF, Structural and Environmental specialists. We know of no other firm in the nation that exclusively serves local governments that has such a team with such all-round experience.

This depth and breadth of talent and experience enables us to ‘level the playing field’ for communities in their dealings with telecommunications service providers and applicants. They find that for the first time they are truly able to deal with the industry as equals, thereby reversing the historic roles, making the local government the proactive and controlling party."

I feel fortunate to have spoken with Mr Colmi for at least an hour about this tower. Though he couldn't give me specific guidance on how to stop this pole, he did give me a lot of great information about the cell tower industry.

One of the most shocking statistics he gave me is the average income one cell phone carrier on one site can generate is $2250 per day! That's $800,000 a year for each cell carrier! This tower means big money for AT&T. I don't believe for one minute that AT&T hasn't already been out shopping other carriers to rent on their monopole, as they intimated to the City of Duluth.

Mr Colmi also told me that most cities don't have a plan in place to control the expansion of cell towers in their areas. Cities could be bringing in big revenue in many ways from these towers. I tend to believe that this tower will not benefit the City in any way.

This site should be taxed as commercial property, I wonder if it is? Cell phone companies are not tax exempt like other utilities. Mr Colmi said that most communities do not know this and do not tax properly. You can bet I'm going to check the property records and raise a stink if it's not!

The City should be identifying back taxed sites where they will allow cell towers, that way the taxpayers could benefit from the leases on the land. One lease that the Center was able to negotiate brought in $2.8 million dollars for a 30 year lease!

The City should have an application fee in the range of $5000 for a new cell site and $2000 for a site on an existing tower. Why? Well, we have to keep records at the city, someone has to review plans, our city council and planning commissions have to review it...who pays for all that? I wonder what Duluth's application fee is, this is something I haven't dug into yet.

Mr Colmi's company works with local governments to implement all of these things. I passed all of this information, including links to the website, to the City Administration. Do you think they will actually do something with it? I have my doubts.