(CN) – In a battle of Nature vs. Netflix, the internet maybe winning, as cellphone towers propagate around the country in the last frontier of cell coverage: national parks and national forests.
A complaint filed this week with the Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General claims national parks across the United States are allowing cell coverage to spread into wild backcountry areas without public involvement, without getting paid and sometimes without knowing who owns the towers.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) said in its Oct. 30 letter to Mary Kendall, deputy inspector general for the U.S. Department of Interior, that Yosemite National Park is the latest national park in America to allow cellphone towers to be built without adequate government or public oversight.
“Not only is this a helluva way to run a railroad, but Yosemite does not even know who owns the trains,” Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, said. He said there's a tendency of many national park superintendents to “ensure every square inch of their park has a strong 4G signal, thus creating conflict between connectivity and serenity in remote corners of wired parks.
“Visitor convenience should be secondary to protecting park values, such as scenery, soundscapes, and the ability to commune with nature,” Ruch added. “Striking the right balance requires careful planning – a commodity in short supply across much of our park system.”
The law allowing commercial telecommunications equipment in America's backcountry forests and parks goes back to 1996, when President Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act. The act is meant to “promote competition and reduce regulation in order to secure lower prices and higher quality services for American telecommunications consumers and encourage the rapid deployment of new telecommunications technologies.”
Clinton’s memorandum of Aug. 10, 1995, titled “Facilitating Access to Federal Property for the Siting of Mobile Services,” directed federal agencies to develop access to federal property for the siting of mobile telecommunications equipment.
The law is broad and vague, allowing local discretion in approving and placement of cellphone towers. The Telecommunications Act orders “placement of commercial antennas on federal property, make federal property, including parkland, available for placement of telecommunications equipment by duly authorized providers absent unavoidable conflicts with the department or agency’s mission, or the current or planned use of the property, or access to that property.”
Construction of telecommunications service on public lands can also lead to local spending on infrastructure. In Montana, an obscure gravel mountain road leading to the small ski area of Blacktail Mountain, is being paved by federal and county governments – all 13 miles to the summit, where telecommunications equipment is proliferating. The 7,200-foot mountain provides easy access for telecommunications equipment that can broadcast signals in a rapidly growing area next to Glacier National Park.
Using a rate schedule from 1996, the federal government charges rent to cell service providers for placing their equipment on federal land. The rates are based on the population base that the telecom equipment serves. For rural areas of less than 50,000 people, the rate is about $4,000 annually. For major urban areas of 1 million to 2.5 million people, the annual lease fee is about $13,000, and it goes as high as $19,000 annually for sites that serve 5 million or more people.