Zoning Issues Plague LA-RICS’ Tower Development

April 2, 2015

By J. Sharpe Smith —

Smith

April 2, 2015 — Communications tower development for the Los Angeles Regional Interoperable Communications System (LA-RICS) is being slowed by protests from members of the public and the firefighters, the very people the communications system is supposed to help.

With more than 80 public safety agencies, 34,000 first-responders, 4,060 square miles and 10 million, the Los Angeles metro area seems like the perfect example of the need for a regional interoperable public safety communications network. The project was hatched in 2010 and promised $154.6 million in federal funding. A network was designed with land mobile radio (LMR) to handle voice communications and LTE to handle data. The resulting network would have LTE sites, LMR sites and some sites that would handle both.

But with a deadline of Sept. 30 looming, LA may lose that funding. Neighbors and firefighters, whose fire stations provide sites for many of the towers, are fighting the placement of the communications towers, stoked by fears of RF radiation. The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors called a halt to further deployment of towers on March 24, suggesting that LA-RICS explore other methods of building and paying for system.

This is not the first sign of trouble for LA-RICS. Multiple local jurisdictions, 13 out of 86 cities, have already pulled out of the project. Of the 232 sites proposed for the public LTE system, 39 have been dropped so far because of local objections.
There are 88 sites in the current proposed design for the LMR network; a total of 120 sites are being considered to provide alternate locations.

The zoning problems neither bode well for LA-RICS nor for the proposed nationwide First Responder Network, according to Charles Ryan III of the telecom consulting and engineering firm Concepts to Operations.

“LA-RICS is a federal action and a federal system, and you now have local officials saying the citizens are screaming too loud for them to ignore them. They can’t build the towers and now have large coverage holes in the middle of a federal project, which is now in jeopardy,” Ryan said at the recent IWCE. “States can opt in or opt out of FirstNet. Now we have local jurisdictions that think their local zoning authority – their little fiefdoms – can stop a national project for public safety.”

With public safety agencies still using aging, incompatible radio systems, it is hard to see a lot progress from the communications debacle that occurred during the terrorist attacks on Sept. 1, 2001. In fact, 40 different radio systems exist throughout Los Angeles County, operating across divergent radio frequency spectrum, in both analog and digital mode, as well as both conventional and trunked technologies.

If enough local jurisdictions eventually pull out of FirstNet, it would be difficult to imagine how it would reach the lofty goal of a nationwide broadband public safety network. It makes one wonder. What if local jurisdictions had refused to allow access to the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System? What would our highways look like today?

Click here to Subscribe to AGL Magazine