Cell Phone vs Landline, Let's talk about "staying on task."

A city official asked me last week, "Do you have any solutions for citizens so that we can provide better cell phone service? We need to stay on task as many people have gotten rid of their land lines and now have cell phones for their entire service."

I have a problem with this question on two fronts. First, it asks how the we (citizens) can provide better cell service. As far as I know, the citizens of Duluth are not in the cell phone business, and frankly, some of us could care less about improving service. Do we have people calling city hall and asking for better service? Is the city obligated to approve any proposal that comes before them for improved service? Not without verifying actual need! Should we assume that a private company has the best interest in mind when asking for concessions from the community without first verifying that there is actual need in the community?
Do people really need in car coverage on every inch of road?
Is it the community's responsibility to take care of people who are stupid enough to drop their landline when they don't have reliable in home coverage? Why don't they just get an in home antenna to improve their service?
And what happens to their phone when they forget to charge their battery and the phone dies during a 911 call?
What happens when the power goes out for an extended period of time (think winter blizzards) and there is no power to charge that phone or the backup power to the tower goes out? (Think hurricane Katrina)


I'm pretty sure the question was an attempt to shut me up. What follows is a part of what I sent back. I received a scathing reply that basically did not address anything I had suggested, instead I was attacked personally. All I can say is, nice way to "stay on task".

From my email:

1. Have carriers collocate on towers, and when they say they can't then our zoning must require that they submit a written refusal from the tower owner. We could even offer property tax breaks or reduced permit fees (which should be $5000 for a monopole and $2500 for a collocation) if a company agrees to collocate on other towers. If we don't start requiring collocation now and we continue to listen to arguments about 911 we will have to have a tower every 2-4 square miles. We don't need to have a tower every 2-4 miles, but there can be an "antenna" every 2-4 miles. BIG DIFFERENCE! Antennas do not have to be place at 190 feet, but this is the preferred configuration as it is easiest and cheapest for the carrier, and most lucrative when a community starts to REQUIRE collocation (how nice that they already have a tower that can accommodate 3 or more antenna arrays). There are communities that do not allow any tower to be built above 10- 20 feet above the highest feature. This requires more expensive equipment for a carrier, but a community has the right to set these controls.

"While historically, due to a lack of wireless infrastructure, a tower has often been needed, today significantly fewer new towers are needed. Theoretically, almost anything that can support the structural load of an antenna array and its associated cabling and is of sufficient height can serve in lieu of a tower. The effects of buying into this misconception can be seen when traveling any interstate highway.
How many towers do you see that have only 1 or 2 carriers attached and within a 1/2 mile or so there's another identical situation? Assuming that either tower needs to actually exist, there should only be one tower, not two or more." Source, Center for Municipal Solutions

2. Require that tower companies submit to third party review of RF studies by an engineer chosen by the city. Do we require experts to review building plans and utility plans? Why do we take these at their word, does anyone on City staff actually understand the RF studies that are submitted? (I sent this question to the city administration and the entire council...no answer yet!)

3. The test should always be, actual PROVABLE needs of the COMMUNITY. As far as the 911 issue, no one at St Louis County sees it as a big enough problem to even track it. Therefore, there is no actual way to PROVE that AT&T or any other carrier can solve the problem, and frankly, they are doing a disservice to the community in asserting that they can. If a person in Riverside does not have an AT&T phone, this tower will do them absolutely NO GOOD. (The tower will handle 911 calls from any carrier, as is required by law. But if your phone is not AT&T, the AT&T antennas on this tower will not handle your call. If at some point your carrier collocates on that tower, you will see improved service.)

Here's a good example from the Center for Municipal Solutions regarding need vs desires:

A community is obligated to permit an applicant the means to achieve its 'desires' or 'objectives', as opposed to its 'needs' This should be true, but only when desires and objectives coincide with true needs, such as being able to provide "functionally reliable" service. Notably, "functional reliability", not necessarily the signal strength claimed to be needed by the applicant, should be the test as regards meeting the applicant's needs, It's important to know (and understand) exactly what the carrier's needs are, as opposed to its desires or objectives. If one doesn't know exactly what the problem is and what's causing it, as well as all the options for remedying the problem, the local officials simply can not make informed decisions. Instead, they're relegated to simply relying on the applicant's assertions and what little they know about the cause and the possible solutions to the problem.
Desires are normally couched in terms of the Company's 'objectives', which sounds good, but under the law at (47 U.S.C. 332(c)) a company's desires or objectives are not the test. The test is the actual, provable needs of the Company, i.e. to provide "functionally reliable" service primarily within that community and not an adjacent community.
An example of needs versus desires and objectives happened in a North Carolina county recently when the applicant requested a 300' tower for a gap in a sparsely populated rural area along a major highway. Upon review of the application, it was discovered that the carrier already had sufficient signal to provide 'Rural In-Vehicle' signal strength throughout the majority of the alleged gap in service. As it turned out, the applicant was requesting a 300' tower so it could provide the equivalent of 'Urban In-Building' signal strength at the extremities of the area, even though it was to serve a "Rural In-Vehicle" market. Once this was discovered, the Company agreed that it could fill the few relatively small gaps in service that actually existed by co-locating on existing structures. Result: no new tower. The key was in knowing what propagation studies to request, being able to analyze the propagation studies, knowing and understanding the difference between the applicant's desires and its true needs, and knowing what would enable the applicant to fulfill its real need, i.e. to provide Rural In-Vehicle coverage for the relatively small area not already covered.
As the preceding shows, the effects of not understanding the difference between a carrier's legitimate, provable needs and its objectives/desires, and how they should be treated, are significant and can mean the difference between the construction of a new tower and being able to co-locate on an existing facility of some type, with the facilities often being unrecognizable by the average person. Result: No 300' tower and no physical or visual impact on the community, but with improved and expanded service.
(Read about tower misconceptions at the website http://telecomsol.com/misconceptions.html)

4. Understand that our City does not have to permit carriers to fill a gap from a single location, they can fill from distributed antenna systems, these are mulitple antennas which are placed on power poles, on existing structures, towers, and even buildings. There is quite an array of antennas providing service to Lakeside on top of St Michaels school, not even close 190 feet in the air! The cell companies do not pursue this if there is no push back as it is more expensive.

R. I. P. My Sweet Cat Tex

On Monday we had to make the difficult decision to let our cat Tex go. We had been dealing with his ailing kidneys for some time now, and in December the situation went from bad to worse. He spent 10 days in the animal hospital and came home the day before Christmas Eve. In order to keep him going I had to give him subcutaneous injections of water and electrolytes pretty much every day. This involves a fairly large needle injected into the nape of his neck and letting the water flow from an I.V. bag. Not an easy thing to do, and he didn't much like it either. I'd hold him tight, massage his forehead, and hope he'd be able to stay still long enough to get the necessary dose. I didn't always succeed, but I always had to weigh his quality of life, and if he was not liking what I was doing, then it just made it harder. He rallied for four months but eventually his heart just gave out. He was obviously in pain and he'd quit eating. I tried force feeding him food and water for the last week, but on Monday he flat out refused all but water. It was time.

We will really miss this gentle cat. He showed up one day, while I was in the garden. I heard a purring noise, looked down and there he was, a very fat cat lying on his back. I reached down and rubbed his belly and said, "Whoa..who's Bhudda cat are you? From that day on he never wanted to go back to his owner, a neighbor down the road. Tex was a very fat cat, and probably had diabetes which led to the kidney failure in his later years. He was with us for 7 years and we never really knew how old he was. The neighbor said he'd found him as a stray, and that his girlfriend was allergic to cats so he couldn't let him live in his house anymore. We gladly accepted him into ours.

He loved Marlena from the beginning. He let her carry him around, holding him around his chest with her little arms with his body swinging as she walked. She'd dress him up, she'd wrestle with him, and he never said peep or scratched or bit. One year when we were outside with Marlena watching her go down the little hill on her sled, he surprised us all by getting on the back of the sled and riding along with her. We videotaped him riding the sled and then riding down the same hill with her on a wagon in the summer. We would say that he acts more like a dog than a cat. He was never much of a predator. When he first moved in we had a couple voles in the house. He basically watched as they ran past him in his cat bed. He never brought us mice, and living in the country, there was a lot of opportunity, right in the basement! As the picture above shows, he had a curiosity about creatures, but didn't attack. He was sitting on the porch one night, with a mother racoon and 4 babies. He refused to com in and watched as the babies ate his cat food. We quit putting out food after that. Even though the babies were adorable. I think Tex liked them too. He was much too fat and slow to ever catch a bird.

He was the perfect cat in so many ways. He always did his business smack dab in the middle of his box, in all the years we had him he never went onto the sides of his box. He tried to scratch the new couch when it was first delivered. I scolded him and he never scratched the furniture again! He would lie in my arms and let me clip all of his claws, purring the whole time. He never got up onto the counters or table and he loved to take showers or get right into the bathtub with you.

He won over more than one "cat hater" in his life and was well loved by everyone who met him. I miss his little greetings whenever you'd look at him and he'd notice. Just a little chirp to say hi. Sleep well my kitty!

St. Louis County Weighs in on My 911 Cell Call Questions

About a month ago I decided to ask the St. Louis County 911 center about calls that are re-routed from cell phones. I thought, if this is such a life threatening problem as AT&T asserts in their proposal, someone must be tracking it and asking the cell companies to fix it.

Here's the response, what do you think?


Your email inquiry regarding cell phone tower placement was forwarded to me for answer yesterday.

In answer to your questions:

1. Does St. Louis County track emergency calls from cell phones that are rerouted from Douglas County Emergency Services?

Answer: No, we do not.

2. How many calls are identified as rerouted from cell phone calls originating on the Duluth Lakeshore and going over to Douglas County?

Answer: We do not maintain these statistics.

In South St. Louis County, we answer numerous calls on a daily basis which have been placed by wireless callers who are in need of an alternate public safety answering point. Some of the calls require transferring to Douglas County, but we frequently transfer calls to Carlton County, Lake County, and our North St. Louis County Dispatch Center as well. Occasionally we must transfer a call as far away as Ashland, WI or Houghton, MI. Our 9-1-1 telephone equipment is configured in such way that we are able to accomplish the most commonly used transfer locations by pressing a single button on the telephone panel.

This issue is not unique to St. Louis County, it is an issue for 9-1-1 call centers nationwide. It is not limited to a single carrier, but involves all carriers. The process of transferring calls to another call center or in receiving a call as a transfer from another center is "business as usual" in our industry.

Geographic features such as the terrain, and specifically in our area, the vast expanse of Lake Superior, seem to produce an increase in coverage challenges. These, however, are carrier issues. We are not involved in the site planning or placement of cellular towers with any of the wireless carriers who provide coverage in our area.

I hope this explanation addresses the inquiry you placed to our agency.

Thank you.


St. Louis County 9-1-1 (Duluth Center)

When is an Expert an Expert?

This week the city council deliberated over a cell tower in the Riverside neighborhood of Duluth. I regret not being at the meeting. I heard that the AT&T representative mentioned "Ms. Boedigheimer" and the issues about migration I have raised. I love raising awareness! I anxiously await the opportunity to listen to this meeting when Pactv gets the DVD to the library. Evidently there was a bit of discussion by some councilors about the issue of cell towers "biting them in the back in the future." There was even a discussion about tabling ALL tower requests until the new zoning code is written! WOW...now we are moving in the right direction!

The DNT published this account of the meeting:
Published April 12 2010: Cell tower approved for Riverside neighborhood By: Brandon Stahl , Duluth News Tribune

"Councilor Jay Fosle knocked on doors and determined that residents of the Riverside neighborhood wouldn't mind a nearly 180-foot-tall cell tower being put in their community. And so the Duluth City Council approved giving AT&T the authority tonight to build a tower along the St. Louis River to provide what the company said will be a better cell phone connection for residents. Among the objections in the past to cell towers along the river or Lake Superior is the threat to birds. But Fosle said he spoke to a bird expert who said a greater threat to birds is picture windows."

Yikes! I was pretty miffed at this old and lazy argument. I asked Anna Peterson, a PHd candidate whose research involves the impacts of wind towers, cell towers, and tall structures on migrating birds in our area, what she had to say about this: "Yes, windows are a huge threat to migrating birds. The issue with towers or any structure is cumulative affect (windows, towers, turbines, and cats). In my opinion, it is foolish to separate one mortality factor from another (ie. towers versus windows). It's like saying what's one more forest clearcut? Or 100 more SUVs on the road? The argument is not valid. What's one more tower? You can imagine the impact when every city has that attitude because "windows" are more of a threat.
And I'm quite sure the ATT's bird expert shares that view."

I was really curious to know WHO this "bird expert" was that had emailed the councilor with such a poor argument. I had heard it was someone who had 28 years at Hawk Ridge, and had counted birds at the Lakewood Pumping Station. It sounds like someone who would have some credentials, probably a scientist, maybe an ornithologist? But no! I find out that it is a local bird guide, someone who seems to have NO actual professional credentials. It's nice that you are a local bird guide, but be called an "expert" and represented as such in an official proceeding is just wrong. His website lists his qualifications as having led birding trips and groups. Um, can you really say that he is qualified to be considered an "expert" who we use as a source of "expert" opinion to make decisions that might affect the entire City? Most people who are "experts" have some professional credential to back it up. Even a college degree in biology would help! It might help to verify sources and arguments proffered before repeating them in public. Once you've said it in a public forum, you own it.

Anna's argument is very clear. There are a great number of things that place pressure on birds. And the accumulation of further stresses is only going to make the situation worse. Several groups are working to raise awareness of the window issue and technology is available to make windows less likely to kill. There are campaigns to turn lights off in skyscrapers to minimize risk. The Audubon and American Bird Conservancy have invested countless hours and resources to raising awareness of the cat predation issue. People are not going to give up their beloved pets, but they can become aware of the issue and act accordingly. The same holds true for communication towers and windmills. As we become aware that they are another stress on bird population we have a similar obligation to be mindful in their placement. I am not opposed to all towers. I just want to see that they are not rammed down the throat of communities. Government bodies must act on a community's actual PROVABLE need for a tower. They must respect our natural resources, which belong to all citizens (and yes, wildlife IS a natural resource.) Our leaders should only approve new towers after it is PROVEN that a cell carrier needs it to provide a service that will fill a PROVEN COMMUNITY need. New towers should always be a last resort, after all, what they really need is an array of antennas. Carriers should be required to explore all other configurations (distributed antenna systems, on power poles, locating on tall structures, collocation on other towers, etc.)before building new towers.

No one knows exactly why birds are killed at towers, there are factors that are being studied, and we know that there is likely a link to lighting, weather, migration, and guy wires. Any single one of these factors, or a combination of them can cause problems for birds flying near a tower. Anna Peterson has stated that there will likely be kills at this Riverside tower. It is a high migration area in the springtime. But, it will take a combination of things, low ceiling, poor visibility, bad weather, high numbers of birds flying low. So, it may not happen a lot, but it probably will happen, hopefully not often, hopefully not ever. But if it does, I hope the tour guide regrets that he played a part in the approval of a tower that caused those deaths.

Maybe People are Finally Paying Attention

This article was in the Duluth News Tribune today. I received a call from the reporter yesterday and steered him to Anna Peterson. I will attend the council meeting on Monday and speak on our city's shabby zoning. I am quite displeased with Cindy Petkac's assertion that we do not have to consider birds when approving cell towers. I suppose that she would say that because our zoning does not address this specifically, BUT as a community we do have to consider the laws in regard to migratory birds and endangered species. AT&T and our City could incur fines and great embarrassment if we completely ignore warnings and guidelines from USFWS and MN DNR. If there were massive kills at these towers (and it IS possible, these kills happen during weather events..anyone remember the Bong Bridge fog a few years ago?) how would we be able to go on advertising our community as friendly to birders and birds. We advertise all over the world that we have a world class migration in Duluth, we lure in tourists and sell hotel rooms because we have Hawk Ridge. How embarrassing will it be to read Petkac's quote once we have a major kill at one of the towers that the City leaders have approved? The council cannot claim that they are not aware of this issue now.

Duluth councilors anticipate storm over proposed cell tower in Riverside
Brandon Stahl - 04/09/2010


Fifth District City Councilor Jay Fosle said he’ll be spending his weekend knocking on every door in the Riverside neighborhood. While the area is in his district, he’s not campaigning for re-election, but wants to determine whether residents would be opposed to AT&T constructing a 180-foot-tall cell tower along the waterfront. “We’ve got to get out in front of this, this time,” he said. Fosle is referring to past cell towers the council has approved only to see residents find out later and oppose the construction. A tower along the North Shore that was approved by the council last year since has been criticized by bird enthusiasts, the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for being a potential fatal danger to migrating raptors and waterfowl. Being a danger to birds isn’t something the city has to consider when approving cell towers, said city land use supervisor Cindy Petkac. But Councilor Sharla Gardner said she wouldn’t vote to approve the tower until she has a better idea if it’s a risk. “Clearly that’s a standard for our community,” she said during a Thursday night council agenda session. The tower could pose a danger to birds, said Anna Peterson, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota Duluth who is writing a dissertation on migratory bird patterns from Duluth to Grand Portage. But it’s difficult to determine how much of a danger it could be. “I can say with a high level of certainty that it will kill birds,” she said. “I just don’t know how many that will be.” Birds do migrate along the St. Louis River corridor, she said, sometimes at a rate of thousands to millions in a short period of time during the migratory periods. Because there’s such a high concentration of the birds, Peterson said, it’s likely the cell tower will kill a few of them — and even more during high fog or low cloud level days. She said a tower with guy wires and lights increases the risk — something this pole tower isn’t likely to have, according to the specifications submitted to the city. “The tower may not kill birds for years,” Peterson said. “But given the right conditions, it could potentially kill lots of birds in one evening.” As to the aesthetics of the pole and whether neighbors object, Petkac said about 15 residents who live near the proposed site were notified and none complained. But Fosle said he wants the feedback of the entire neighborhood before it’s too late, hence the door knocking. “The battle has started only after the fact,” he said.

The DNR weighs in on the proposed tower

We received notice today that the City of Duluth received another letter of warning about the cell tower. This one comes from the Minnesota DNR and has very strong words about the potential for to migrating birds. It also rebuts Shane Begley's assertion that the DNR said there were no concerns with endangered species!

Click on the title to read the letter...it's a great one!