By VICKI URBANIK

Porter County planners are considering how, and if, to change the county’s tower ordinance to accommodate a new technology in local telephone and internet service.

FBN Indiana, an affiliate of the Hebron-based Nitco and Netnitco, is proposing a wireless broadband local exchange and internet service. The project would involve the placement of poles, each with a transmission box, about two miles apart on easements in public rights of way.

Exactly where the service would be offered is still under study. Michael Bucko, director of consumer and community development for Netnitco, said FBN is investigating its options for providing service options throughout Northwest Indiana.

FBN has approached Porter County officials to see how its project could mesh with existing ordinances. The county already has a tower ordinance, but it was designed mainly to regulate large cellular phone towers in the county’s unincorporated areas.

FBN attorney Kit Earle said because FBN is a public utility providing a public service, it’s possible that FBN’s project could proceed without having to follow county ordinances. However, he said FBN wants to be a good neighbor and work within the county’s regulations.

At a Porter County Plan Commission meeting earlier this month, proposed ordinance changes were debated, and planners tabled the matter for further review.

“It’s a work in progress,” Bucko said later.

Plan Commission member Robert Detert said the trend in public utilities is to bury the infrastructure needed, not install more above-ground poles or wires. “It just seems like we’re going backwards,” he said. Planner Rich Burns said the plan commission and Board of Zoning Appeals repeatedly hear from residents that they don’t want new towers in their backyards.

“If it’s like cell towers, we’re going to have these things all over,” Detert added.

But Bucko and Earle said it’s unlikely that the project would lead to a proliferation of poles, since FBN’s competitors are unlikely to change their entire systems. Bucko also said FBN’s poles would be less intrusive than the telephone poles people are used to seeing everywhere, which can get up to 80 feet tall with a 20 inch base. FBN’s poles will be 68 to 70 feet tall with a 17-inch diameter base, every two miles apart instead of 150 feet apart.

“It’s another pole,” Detert responded.

Bucko said the big advantage to FBN’s project is that people who now can’t get wireless service, especially those in the rural areas, or who don’t like their wireless service due to its limitations, will be able to. And, he said, the system eliminates the need for the telephone pedestals in people’s yards.

“The public is out there wanting the public service. And they can’t get it,” he said.

A concern was raised about how to word the ordinance to apply to all providers, not just to FBN. Bucko noted that the poles in FBN’s project aren’t the big cell towers covered by the ordinance, but Plan Commission Attorney Karen Tallian said she wants wording to cover everyone to ensure that someone who is planning a tower won’t call it a pole in order to avoid tougher standards.

As it is now, if FBN were to follow the county’s tower ordinance, it would need to apply to the Porter County BZA for a special exception for each and every pole.

Tallian instead put together language that would allow applicants like FBN to file just one plan outlining their project, with that overall plan, not the individual poles, subject to plan commission approval. The language would apply only to public utilities seeking to place poles in the public right of way.

Plan commission member Herb Read sought assurances that FBN would first need permission before putting up poles on the easements in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, where utilities have been removed but the easement remains. Earle said FBN has no problem receiving that approval, but added that it’s unlikely FBN would provide the service in those areas anyway.

Posted 8/12/2005