Tower consultation to be “e-town hall” and set to begin this summer

The head of the committee appointed by the federal government to conduct a review of Industry Canada’s antenna tower siting policy says the consultation will likely run from mid-June until the end of July of this year. David Townsend, chair of the National Antenna Tower Review Committee and a law professor at the University of New Brunswick, has set an aggressive time frame and anticipates being able to release a final report with recommendations to the department by Dec. 1, 2003. The public consultations will be a dual process, Townsend explains, with the first round taking place in the form of an electronic town hall meeting through a web site specifically designed for the national e-consultation. The second will be a consultation on what comes out of the first round. Both of these consultations will be conducted by a working group centred primarily at the University of New Brunswick. The e-town hall concept will allow people to interact in near real-time and discuss the various issues involved. Industry minister Allan Rock announced the review last fall and recently unveiled a blue ribbon panel of experts to act as an advisory board to the antenna tower policy working group (RoW Update, Nov. 4/02 and April 7/03). Townsend, says the working group will collaborate with xwave to build the web site through which public participation will take place. "We’re trying to make this as transparent as possible so that in a sense we’ve adopted this metaphor, architecture and objectives of a town hall," he tells Report on Wireless. There are several advantages to conducting a national e-town hall meeting, Townsend explains. "There’s this aspect of someone kicking off a comment and everyone having an opportunity to react. … will be able to enter into local discussions of local issues…antenna hotspot(s) where there seems to be strong resistance. People from that area in particular will be able to dialogue, share views and even blow off steam about what has happened or what is happening in their community relating to the siting of a radio antenna." Municipalities in various regions of the country have complained recently about the lack of an effective consultation process with wireless operators and the government about antenna tower site selections (RoW, Sept. 3/02 and Oct. 28/02). Earlier this year, the government released an independent study about a particular case in British Columbia, which criticized certain government policies (RoW, Feb. 18/03). Following a six-week public e-consultation, there will be another round of consultations on the information and the general sentiment gathered from that initial period, Townsend says. "We would capture as best we could what we learned, the sentiment from that web site, and then we would mount that and let people react to what we learned from the national online consultation," he explains. The dual consultation process will also be supplemented with one or two field investigations, which will be completed prior to the web site launch, Townsend notes. "We would like to talk to a couple of community groups that have gone through the siting experience that were interactive in opposing to get their feelings from how did the consultation work from their perspective. What do they think the relevant questions are? Is working?" he tells RoW. Private meetings with antenna tower stakeholders such as the mobile wireless operators and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities will also serve to get their particular interests on the table. Townsend says both of these groups have already been slotted in for in-person talks with the working group. The time frame of these meetings hasn’t yet been set in stone, Townsend says. They are likely to take place in July and August, but could extend into September, as well. He notes that some groups have already contacted the antenna tower policy working group about presenting more formal submissions.

Tower consultation to be “e-town hall” and set to begin this summer

News | 04/15/2003 4:00 am EDT

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