City mulls approach to 5G on public property
The next generation of wireless technology has begun its rollout across the globe, but Arcata residents want to limit the ability of cellular companies to build the infrastructure within city limits.
The Arcata City Council opted not to provide direction to staff about an ordinance accommodating 5G technology, which would provide substantially faster connection speeds than the currently 4G technology. Instead several council members said they would prefer more information, particularly about Mill Valley’s urgency ordinance barring small 5G towers in residential areas, before they provide direction.
“I’m not inclined to focus on any action or direction,” said Mayor Michael Winkler. “Direction for research, but not beyond that and not to enact or adopt this at this time.”
The reason the ordinance is coming up now is because of recent developments from the Federal Communications Commission “that have made the deployment of small cell wireless facilities much easier with the result that regulation by the city is much more difficult,” said Arcata City Attorney Nancy Diamond.
Publicly-owned property falls into two categories: right-of-way properties, such as street lights and utility poles, while nonright-of-way properties are “buildings and other types of city-owned properties that are not in the right of way,” Diamond said.
The previous law was that cities could only charge “minimal cost recovery” for right-of-way properties, but could charge market rate for access to non-right-ofway properties, Diamond said.
“That’s been eliminated,” Diamond said. “The city cannot charge market rate and it cannot really limit access any longer to this new defined category of wireless telecommunications facilities that are called the small cell.”
The small cell is part of the 5G rollout and consists of antenna that are about 16 inches high, have ground support walls that “can get up to 4 to 6 feet, maybe 1 or 2,” and would be spaced “relatively closely together,” Diamond said.
“Under the new federal order, these are now also almost exclusively principally permitted anywhere on publicly-owned property,” Diamond said.
That order is currently under litigation, Diamond said, but the city could move in the direction of a dig-once policy so “once (the tower is) installed, all other utilities have to go in on the same conduit.”
However, several members of the public expressed concerns about health issues that could arise from the rollout of 5G technology.
“These new 5G towers will again emit upwards to a thousand times more radiation than current towers,” said one Arcata resident.
Diamond said the new rule changes disallow municipalities from turning down the towers over health concerns, though there is some precedent for barring them for historic preservation reasons.
A review of more than a hundred research articles done by Kenneth Foster, of the University of Pennsylvania, and John Moulder, of the Medical College of Wisconsin, on wireless networking technology, revealed there is “no basis to anticipate that Wi-Fi exposure will cause any biological effects.”
The new technology will also be at a higher frequency so it will have a “shorter penetration depth” in humans, so “there are no other apparent biological or biophysical reasons to expect the biological effects of WiFi radiation to be different” at a higher frequency, the authors write in “Wi-Fi and Health: Review of Current Status of Research” from 2013.
One study showed a “roomful of schoolchildren all simultaneously uploading large files over a single (wireless local area network), the total transmitted power would be “roughly similar to that radiated by a single mobile phone handset,” the review stated.
The studies the authors reviewed that did show adverse health impacts had “technical limitations” that made them “difficult to interpret.”
The FCC website states the reforms are intended to “ban short-sighted municipal roadblocks that have the effect of prohibiting deployment of 5G.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein penned a Jan. 16 op-ed for the San Jose Mercury News that said the new rules are impinging on the rights of citizens and local governments to have a say over what happens in their community.
“Without a doubt, 5G technology is vital to the economic future of our country and key to our global competitiveness,” Feinstein wrote. “But it must be implemented in a way that incorporates the feedback and oversight of local communities.”