ACRA has submitted comments to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), urging it to reject a petition to amend its rules to exempt broad classes of telecommunications infrastructure from NEPA and NHPA.
In March, CTIA – The Wireless Association requested that the FCC revise its rules to provide that wireless facility deployments pursuant to a geographic area license that do not require antenna structure registration are not major federal actions under NEPA or undertakings under NHPA.
In its comments, ACRA states that the petition “seeks to undermine more than two decades of collaborative work by the federal government, industry, states, Tribes and others to ensure a sensible balance between improvements to our telecommunications infrastructure and compliance with federal law.”
Noting that the FCC, ACHP and NCSHPO instituted a nationwide programmatic agreement in 2004 that streamlined the Section 106 process for FCC undertakings, ACRA wrote that the petition “asks the FCC to ignore the [agreement] that was developed in good faith and unilaterally assume the power to decide which undertakings are not worthy of consideration under statutes or regulations. Worse, it asks the FCC to do so without providing any evidence that such a move is necessary, or warranted by any statutory or regulatory developments. By asking the FCC to alter the NPA terms without going through the open consultation process established more than 20 years ago, the petition asks the FCC to violate both the letter and spirit of NHPA.”