Title: Wireless Planning in Lincoln, Nebraska

Author: Abigail P. Davis

Abstract:

The Wireless Planning GIS Project in Lincoln, Nebraska, is a useful tool for city planners and government officials involved with telecommunications technology planning, specifically personal wireless facilities. A spatial database of approved city and county special permits for communication and wireless facilities in the City of Lincoln and Lancaster County, Nebraska provides both image and textual data. This project addresses current concerns and issues involved with planning and the telecommunications industry, and can be used by city and county planners, government officials, private citizens, and interested telecommunications companies.

GIS in the Planning of Personal Wireless Facilities in Lincoln, Nebraska

Introduction.

This paper will discuss the Personal Wireless Facilities GIS Project of the Lincoln/Lancaster County Planning Department in Lincoln, Nebraska. This project is a useful tool for city planners, government officials, and private citizens involved with personal wireless facility planning. In addition, there are research applications for interested telecommunications companies.

The zoning ordinances of both the City of Lincoln and Lancaster County concerning personal wireless facilities require telecommunication companies to obtain a special permit before receiving a building permit. ArcView GIS by Esri supplied a unique opportunity for planners to be able to see the geographic location of special permits for wireless facilities throughout the city and county, while also being able to access tabular data concerning these permits.

A spatial database is used in this project of approved city and county special permits for communication and wireless facilities in the City of Lincoln and Lancaster County, Nebraska. The database provides planners with updated information of personal wireless facility sites such as owner of facility, type of facility (monopole, lattice, stealth facilities, collocations), applicant name, height of facility, address, use (PCS, cellular, ESMR), zoning district, year approved, Administrative Special Permit Number, Special Permit Number, Resolution Number, and Executive Order Number. In addition, photographs of a number of facilities and facility design are also included.

The potential applications of this tool are numerous, and the previous list is only a beginning of possibilities. This paper will discuss some of these potential uses, as well as related issues and concerns when working with personal wireless facilities from a land use planner's perspective. This project is intended to be used in a variety of ways by other planning departments, planning commissions and other governmental officials; private citizens; and telecommunications companies in similar situations, eager to hear about the challenges faced by one planning department when involved with the fast-paced, rapidly changing telecommunications industry and personal wireless facility planning.

Background.

There are many issues that must be addressed by planners when involved with the permit process and approval associated with personal wireless facilities. Unlike most processes that land use planners play a role in, wireless facilities bring in a twist that adds difficulty- that of new technology. It is difficult because new technology is often alarming to the general public. As with any new technology, especially those dealing with radio or micro waves, the general public is simultaneously delighted with the convenience of it, yet often concerned with their health, safety, and welfare. A few major concerns are safety, aesthetics, and the issue of local jurisdiction in regulating and monitoring telecommunications companies activities and the personal wireless facilities that are necessary for operation. Perhaps the reader has witnessed private citizens and city officials in public hearings say that they were afraid of airplanes or helicopters crashing into a celltower which would then fall on their home, that they are concerned that the radio waves emit dangerously high radiation, killing children and trees, that a celltower will be an eyesore in the neighborhood if approved, and will affect their quality of life and the value of their real estate, or why can we not, as a city, deny an application if we wanted to?

Similar fears surfaced with the advent of the telephone, television, or microwave. One distinct difference is that unlike the telephone, which had a very controlled market growth characteristic of a monopoly, the telecommunications industry had and continues to have a more open market, resulting in a high level of competition and rapid growth.⁽¹⁾ A positive economic phenomenon of this rapid growth is the interplay between an increase of competitors, resulting in an increase of supply and consumer demand. As the price of cellphones and associated services are driven down, the general public sees wireless technology as a feasible option. In fact, "the past two years have seen cellular subscribers soar by more than 40 percent, to 123 million."

Telecommunications companies have been well aware of the unique economic opportunities their industry is creating. It is the public sector that is now raising their head to see the importance of their own involvement and technological education, in order to fulfill their role of representing the best interest of the people. At the same time, cities are exploring ways to utilize the industry for local economic development. The City of Lincoln, for example, has created a "Mayor's Technology Council" for which one focus is on "technology in economic development efforts and increased telecommunication opportunities and competition."⁽²⁾

Yet disseminating information on technology takes time, and the time period that the general public sees one, four, then suddenly twenty celltowers erected in their city is very short. Inevitably, panic strikes the neighborhoods and public hearings are wrought with controversy. There is little time for the public to be educated on telecommunication technology before the public hearing has come and gone, the permits have been approved and the facility is up and running . The general public, the planner, the city officials, and the wireless company all end up frustrated, unsatisfied, and exhausted. Meanwhile, the wireless company completes their buildout, there is a lull in activity, until a new company comes to town, and the process begins again.

A multitude of concerns such as local and federal legislation, zoning, city department policy, and technology are voiced by private citizens and governmental officials and are important, whether real or perceived, and need to be addressed by the city planner. In order to do so, however, the planner must be informed. As a land use planner, however, it is generally the technology that is the most unfamiliar aspect of the whole list. Therefore, the planner may have many of the same questions and concerns as the ones she hears in a public hearing.

It is the planner's responsibility to educate herself and, to various degrees, also educate private citizens, planning commissioners, and city council members on wireless technology and the legislation that regulates it. A sure step forward is a spatial database providing a view of all approved facilities throughout the city and county, and data on each of those facilities all included in one GIS project, accessible and organized. Clearly defining specific aspects and relationships is always a good step in understanding a complicated, unfamiliar environment.

Sources and Methodology.

The sources used for this project range from collected data by a previous planner to recent photos taken of existing personal wireless facilities. An enormous amount of time was given by Natalie Becker, a short term land use intern in the planning department. In addition, staff in the Information and Planning Division within the planning department provided invaluable ideas and advice on how to make the project a success. See the table below for specific sources used and who or where the source was found.

Table 1. Sources

The initiation of this project served several purposes. One of the most important being the education and training of both the newly hired planner and the intern who collaborated on this work. It served as an introduction on how to utilize GIS technology to explore research goals. In essence, it is a project of a basic nature, which will hopefully lead to more in-depth projects in the future.

The project relied heavily on the data collected throughout the years by Jennifer Dam, a land use planner who had previously been assigned to the special permit projects for personal wireless facilities. It is important to note that in the planning field, as in many professional fields, there is a great reliance upon intellectual capital. Experienced planners can provide information in minutes concerning the history of permits and projects in a geographic area that would otherwise take hours or weeks of research time for a novice planner. In this case, a novice planner entertained an idea of how to quickly obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the telecommunications industry's presence in the city/county in addition to individual locations of personal wireless facilities. By discussing the concept with an experienced planner, the novice found that the idea had also, not surprisingly, occurred to the experienced planner, and an attempt to implement the concept had also occurred.

All approved personal wireless facilities had been recorded on a spreadsheet containing various categories of information. The spreadsheet, or tabular data, was then incorporated into an ARC/INFO coverage which used a point feature to display the special permit locations of personal wireless facilities. The resulting project combined spatial and tabular data to be used by the planner. Unfortunately, the planner had to place the project aside, becoming to busy with the influx of applications for special permits as the demand for cellphones and other telecommunications services increased rapidly in Lincoln/Lancaster County, Nebraska. The previous planner's efforts were not wasted, however, as her data served as a strong foundation and as a model for this project.

Using this existing GIS project, the current planner and intern reviewed fields of the existing attribute table. The categories of data were compared for relevancy by using the city zoning ordinance on personal wireless facilities, Planning Department policies, and city policies put forth by the Law Department, the Mayor's Office, and the Urban Design Committee of Lincoln. In addition, new and revised categories were chosen for purposes of the Planning Department staff, potential use by private citizens, and for interested telecommunications companies. See the below table for selected field categories for the attribute table and why they were chosen.

Table 2. Field Categories

Another primary source of information was the repository of hard-copy files held in the Planning Department. This consists of hard-copy file folders containing staff reports, final approved plans, resolutions, executive orders, among other information on each special permit that has been approved. Many of these folders were reviewed and recorded into the attribute table, some information could only be found in the folder. This was time-consuming yet necessary work, and would not have been accomplished if an intern had not been available.

Digital photographs of various personal wireless facilities were taken by the authors. Examples of various types of wireless facilities were chosen such as stealth rooftop, lattice tower, monopole tower, and stealth flagpole. The photographs were then hot-linked to the associated point location of the personal wireless facility shapefile.

Hot-linking the photo allows the GIS user to view the photo by selecting a specific locational point with the hot-link tool. The photo of that facility then is accessed and appears on the screen. This aspect of the project would allow a planner, among others, to rapidly obtain a basic image of the facility. Although this would not take the place of a site visit, it is an asset for many reasons, for one as it allows the planner to view the existing site while working on a collocation application on that facility. Viewing images could also allow the planner an idea of the "big picture" of the telecommunications industry in the city, and what the various companies' facilities look like after being built. A planner could also share an image with a new company in a pre-application conference as a reference to an exemplary facility design. A few examples of creative stealth facilities in Lincoln appear below (Qwest Wireless, GPS Antenna on public parking garage; AT&T, stealth flagpole; and Sprint PCS, stealth rooftop facility):

Research Applications of the Project

This project addresses current concerns and issues involved with land use planning, personal wireless facilities, and the telecommunications industry. There are three basic uses of this tool that can be applied in a variety of ways and by a diverse range of users. These basic uses are:

• To gain a general visual understanding of the presence of personal wireless facilities in the City of Lincoln and Lancaster County, Nebraska.



• To easily and rapidly access specific data of special permits for personal wireless facilities

• To use this data and understanding for:

• •Staff reports