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A plan to regulate how and where communication companies can build cell phone towers in the Fairbanks North Star Borough would require firms to, when possible, share sites when putting up equipment.

Communications companies said the proposed ordinance, pitched last week by an assemblyman, sounds reasonable but hope to avoid dealing with too much red tape.

The plan looks to extend some of the same rules currently applied to a few other types of communication equipment — radio station and microwave relay towers among them — to cell-phone and other types of towers in and close to town. It also would add some new rules in most residential, commercial and loosely-zoned land in or near the city, including the almost automatic requirement of a public review and hearing.

The measure would require new towers to be less than 120 feet tall unless the builder shows good reason for going a few feet higher — like adding a second or third antenna from another company, a clause aimed at reducing the number of towers needed in Fairbanks overall. It also looks to employ a stick to complement that carrot, stating, for example, that “all licensed carriers shall cooperate with each other” to try and share towers before they can get a permit to build a new one nearby.

The proposal, from Borough Assembly member Luke Hopkins, follow a handful of problems between local governments, neighbors and companies about new cell towers.

A pair of communication companies last week showed mixed early reaction. Cell companies like sharing towers for equipment because they can save money and can cut down on costs that accompany the development process, said Paula Dobbyn, a spokeswoman for Alaska Communications Systems. David Morris, a spokesman for GCI, said his company doesn’t mind the prospect of new rules as long as they’re “reasonable.”

But Dobbyn indicated communities might want to give companies a long leash with which to team up when building towers. She said sometimes competition or other factors can make a shared tower a bad idea, and laws forcing teamwork in those situations could send the companies and local governments to court — and, because of that, leave customers with higher fees or poorer service than they might expect.

“ACS favors a voluntary, cooperative approach among carriers to co-location, and this is the policy the company already follows,” she wrote Friday in an e-mail to the Daily News-Miner.

Hopkins’ proposal is headed to the borough’s Planning Commission for a review that could last through February. He said communication companies will get their chance soon to weigh in before the assembly formally takes up the measure.

“Now that it’s out there,” he said, “this is the time for the Planning Commission to hear from both the public and the commercial operations.”

Contact staff writer Christopher Eshleman at

459-7582.