Mari Silbey

Hello everyone. I’m Mari Silbey with US Ignite and welcome to the Ignite on Air podcast. This is our fourth and final followup interview to the US ignite Forum event on Smart City Small Cells that took place on April 6th, and today I’d like to welcome Joshua Pace from the office of innovation and sustainability in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Joshua, thanks for joining us.

Joshua Pace

Thanks for inviting me.

Mari Silbey

Can you start by telling us the current status of small cell deployments in Colorado Springs?

Joshua Pace

Yeah, we’ve got about 80 plus or minus applications that have been submitted and approved. Construction is beginning. We have several sites downtown, several sites up North, out East. So yeah, so it’s happening. It’s an ongoing thing. We’re expecting a lot more applications to come in this year and you know, obviously a lot more construction going on this year.

Mari Silbey

So some of those applications, there’s actually construction work that has started.

Joshua Pace

Yes, yes. We have several live sites all over town. I’d say out of those 80 plus or minus applications, I bet I bet 75% of those have been constructed.

Mari Silbey

Okay, great. And how are you managing the permitting process? And one of the reasons I ask is because one of the things we’ve talked a lot about on this podcast is how relationships between communities and wireless carriers are evolving. So I’m curious how you’re managing that permitting process and just your interactions in general with your, with the wireless carriers.

Joshua Pace

Yeah, we, we have, I would say we have really good working relationships with all the carriers. Obviously they’re at different stages. Some were working on master license agreements, some are submitting lots of permits. So I’m in communication with all the carriers pretty regularly; more frequently with the carriers that are more active in town. But it’s been really good knowing what future plans they have, knowing how many permits they’re ready to submit. We meet with some of them weekly because they’re submitting or planning to submit so many in the near future. So just having that constant regular correspondence with them has been really helpful. You know, that way our planning department and public works and everyone who reviews the permits, they know what to expect and when to expect them. It’s also been really good because obviously, because of the shock clocks we have to be careful about making sure we meet all the shot clocks. So it’s been great to have kind of these pre-application meetings where we just sort of talk about [if] there’s any issues we see with a certain permit or a certain site that’s coming in before the shot clock officially starts. So that’s been one really great thing.

Mari Silbey

That’s a really interesting point. So you’re referring to the shot clocks from the FCC order requiring that permits be approved within a certain amount of time. Correct?

Joshua Pace

Right, yep. Yep. So just to avoid any issues with that, we’ve, like I said, we sort of had these kind of informal pre-app[lication] meetings where they’re like, Hey, here’s where we’re thinking of going. Do you foresee any issues, like we’re really close to these power lines. So just kind of those informal discussions before an application’s formally submitted I think has been helpful.

Mari Silbey

Yeah, that’s, that’s a really interesting point, and not something that I have heard elsewhere, that there’s an opportunity to have that discussion before the shot clock even kicks off. Let’s shift a little bit and focus on the design of some of these small cell installations. What’s your city’s thinking been about setting up design standards for installing these small cells?

Joshua Pace

We had some design standards in our city code already. They were very, I’ll just say they were pretty vague and not overly detailed. So that’s been one of our, our key, action items has been developing and publishing those design standards because obviously, again, the FCC said in order to enforce design standards, they can’t be secret. They can’t, you know, they need to be public. So that was a huge effort. Over the last year, we’ve finally published a lot more detailed standards,in January of this year. And a lot of work went into that with our municipally-owned utility, Colorado Springs Utilities. Our planning department, forestry contributed, traffic contributed. So a lot of different departments put their input in on that. And yeah, like I said, we published in January. I think we’ll, we plan to review it probably once a year for the foreseeable future just to keep up with any technology changes or any, any requirements that may change.

Mari Silbey

Can you share any of the requirements in there that you’ve, that turned out to be particularly important to some of those stakeholders?

Joshua Pace

Yeah. For one we had, our traffic department has requirements of like new infrastructure going in at corners or what they call sight triangles, basically at intersections or alleyways or driveways. So that was important to make sure no new poles would go in those areas. Our forestry department had a lot of input on where construction could occur. [There was] a similar requirement around parks. We have a lot of world-class parks, so we wanted to make sure that no poles were going right in front of views of parks and things like that. And Colorado Springs Utilities had a lot of requirements as well around, because they manage our street lighting. So lighting requirements on the type of luminaires that go in. And so yeah, there were a lot of stakeholders in a lot of different aspects of it.

Mari Silbey

Right. What is the, you mentioned some of the parks for example, and also traffic intersections. What does the geographic spread look like for deployment requests?

Joshua Pace

So far they’re mostly going in obviously our denser areas. So we’ve got a lot going on around the downtown area, kind of in the north part of town, what they call the Briargate area. And then on the east side of town we’ve got, there’s a lot of sites going in around that area as well. So, so yeah, it’s been mostly the denser areas. We haven’t had any issues as far as parks or sight triangles or anything like that.

Mari Silbey

Right. And is that, is that opening up any conversations about equitable deployments as well?

Joshua Pace

Yeah, we haven’t had a lot of discussions about that, but we are, I feel like we are kind of still in the early stages of deployment. So we’re, like I said, we’re expecting a lot more permit applications to come in this year just in those informal meetings with the carriers. So, it sort of remains to be seen, I would say. We’ll see as more sites get developed.

Mari Silbey

Do you think the timeline has changed? I’m just curious. Certainly with the current COVID-19 pandemic that’s impacting a lot of construction work and a lot of things that are happening elsewhere. Do you see that impacting timelines?

Joshua Pace

I don’t know. I, we’ve got, we’ve gotten less applications recently. I’ll say that. But then again, in those kind of regular discussions with the providers, they’re still planning to push forward. So maybe there’s a slight delay, but I don’t believe it’s going to be a long-term impact. I still think, and then within the next six months we’ll see a lot more applications coming in.

Mari Silbey

Interesting. Well, final question. How is the public reacting to small cell deployments in Colorado Springs? And what community outreach strategies either have you considered or are you using now?

Joshua Pace

Well so far I really would say it’s more curiosity from the public. They’ll see a small cell site on a street near their neighborhood or something and they’ll, and they’ll just call and say, what is this thing? Like they just don’t know what it is. So it’s been pretty basic questions like that. Like what is this, what does it do? What’s the purpose? And so one of our, so far, one of our main public outreach items has been a webpage that we created. We have some frequently asked questions on there. Again, kind of those basic, what is this thing? What does it do? Who’s putting it there? So we just have some of that basic information out there for residents. I’ve done a kind of informal Council work session and just kind of gave them some of this background information as well.

Joshua Pace

We expect that we’ll go to Council a couple more times just because of like, we’re working on code changes at the same time as all this. So we’ll be talking about small cells more and more with Council, which has obviously public meetings. We’ve got a, well and this podcast I think, because again, another public outreach opportunity. And actually I just talked with our communications department yesterday about this podcast. And they said, well that’s a good idea. Maybe we should do a podcast, just kind of locally through our own communications department. So that’s another idea. And then the providers have also been kind of volunteering to like, if we need some help conveying some of this information, they may be able to help us with that. So yeah. So I would say our communication strategy is, is in the works. We’ve done a couple of things and we have some more ideas of what we’ll do. And yeah, some more stuff should be coming out in the near future.

Mari Silbey

Well, it’s good to know that the carriers are open to participating in that as well. I’ll note that one thing that I discovered recently because there have been some, some public backlash to 5G technology around the fears that radio frequency waves may have a negative health impact, but I discovered that the World Health Organization has issued guidance on the topic which you can find on their website and may be a good resource to point to. Within that guidance, the WHO states that to date, and after much research performed, no adverse health effect has been causally linked with exposure to wireless technologies. So that’s just a good resource again and something to contribute to the conversation.

Joshua Pace

Yeah, thanks. I’ll look at that.

Mari Silbey

And we’re going to have to close it there. My guest today has been Joshua Pace from the Office of Innovation and Sustainability in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Joshua, thanks for joining the podcast.

Joshua Pace

Thank you so much.

Mari Silbey

Thanks to everyone for listening to Ignite on Air. If you are interested in learning more about US Ignite as a nonprofit, and about our public private partnership programs, please visit our website at US dash Ignite dot org. I also want to thank the sponsors for our US Ignite Forum program, including Ingram Micro, Comscope, AT&T, Axis, and Deloitte.