SB 177-REGULATION OF TOWERS  1:54:38 PM CHAIR EGAN announced SB 177 to be up for consideration. 1:54:43 PM DAVID SCOTT, staff to Senator Donald Olson, sponsor of SB 177, explained that this bill is about aviation safety. He said section 1 relates to registering and marking of communication structures, wind towers, and extreme weather towers (EWT) with the Department of Transportation and Public Facilities (DOTPF) 15 days before installation (now 20 days) if this bill passes. 1:57:13 PM Tower owners have to comply with all federal laws and standards related to lighting, painting and visibility of the towers. Enforcement is still a question, but he was looking into that and violators would be punished as provided by AS 12.55, the criminal code. MR. SCOTT said the sponsor put this forward, because he is an active pilot and feels Alaska needs standards for construction and marking of towers. 1:58:42 PM SENATOR DYSON said he was struck by the fact that towers aren't required to have a strobe light, because of all the darkness here. MR. SCOTT said he would get an answer. SENATOR DYSON said he thought there already was existing law, maybe federal, about transmission towers in and around airstrips. MR. SCOTT said that was correct; the FAA has purview if the towers are over 200 ft. 2:00:34 PM SENATOR FAIRCLOUGH said Anchorage has a tower ordinance already and asked if other cities already have local ordinances and if we had collaborated with them to know what is going on. MR. SCOTT replied that he hadn't talked to any municipalities, but he would reach out to them. SENATOR FAIRCLOUGH echoed Senator Dyson's comments about possibly working with existing FAA requirements. She was concerned about the costs associated with marking and registering having noticed that it would cost $120,000 to upgrade a wind project that cost $120,000 to build. They might think about giving people a period of time to change rather than penalizing them if they don't have everything done in one year. CHAIR EGAN said Juneau now has a prohibition on construction of towers until the city adopts an ordinance that regulates cell tower use and one of the main issues is lighting. 2:03:09 PM SENATOR FRENCH said everyone knows what a tower is, but it might need a definition to exclude, for example, buildings over 100 ft. in height. 2:03:51 PM ROBERT DAY, Homer Electric Association (HEA), Homer, Alaska, said he thought SB 177 still needed tweaking. In his particular business, he was concerned that it may cause quite a bit of expense and for utilities throughout Alaska. HEA members had indicated that most of their towers are less than 100 ft. and wouldn't fall under this bill, but the towers that feed Juneau from Snettisham, for instance, would. He said there is also quite a body of regulation from the FAA that requires marking of structures near airport facilities. He was also concerned that transmission towers traversing remote areas near some small airport or waterway could also fall under this bill. It sounds silly, but their transmission towers carry electricity but not the kind of electricity that is conducive to powering signal lights. So, placing signal lights on each tower would be pretty expensive and any kind of maintenance would more than likely require an outage on that transmission line, which would cost a lot. MR. DAY said he was more concerned over registering 50 ft. structures and keeping them up to date, because many of their distribution poles and all of their transmission towers would fall under the 50 ft. regulation and that also falls under "make them visible when close to the airport," for which a body of safety rules and regulations already exists. 2:06:47 PM He said the requirement for registration and putting that information on a public web page could fall afoul of critical infrastructure Homeland Security rules and that they had been being a "lot more coy" about putting information in the public area about electrical systems and how they are built and interconnected since 9/11, so they would find themselves possibly in a position of obeying one law and breaking another. For marking of guy wires, Mr. Day explained that people in Alaska often use a steel transmission structure that has guy wires on both sides and that would be a lot of marker balls if they were required to mark all of them from, say, Bradley Lake all the way into Soldotna Substation. MR. DAY suggested amending language to simply exempt towers that are primarily for the transmission or distribution of electrical power, but he added that putting a communication tower on top of an electrical transmission tower would fall under this legislation. 2:08:27 PM JANE DALE, Alaska Air Carriers Association, Willow, Alaska, supported SB 177. She appreciated the comments of the previous speaker and related that the FAA does have requirements for the public to submit notice of proposed construction when the tower or obstruction is greater than 200 ft. or within 2-4 miles of a public use airport, in general, depending on its length. She said the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would be responsible for enforcement on communication towers and statewide and local regulations appear to be the enforcement tool for other obstructions. MS. DALE said they support this bill, because it would provide some predictability in the air space for carriers and aviators statewide, so that they would be able to visually see obstructions greater than 100 ft., day or night, or could look up obstructions greater than 50 ft. in a registry. 2:10:27 PM SENATOR DYSON asked what the process is for structures like this to start showing up on aeronautical charts and how soon it gets done. MS. DALE responded that not every obstruction is charted, but the FAA could best address that issue. There are towers that are unmarked and unlit within close proximity to an airport, some within the approach of an airport, and often members become aware of that only after they fly into an airport and see the tower. CHAIR EGAN said he used to own radio stations and they were required to light their towers and to file with the FAA and NOAA the name of the station and the tower height to put on their charts. SENATOR DYSON said NOAA had made all of their charts available on line and real time for nothing and he was really interested in timeliness for Alaska's aviators. Aside from that, mariners had been using years' old charts. 2:14:24 PM SENATOR FAIRCLOUGH asked at what height a small plane travels in Alaska and if they could consider raising the elevation of the flight pattern to not have the infrastructure issues. SENATOR FRENCH, referring to language on page 2, asked if it was the intent to have four spherical marker balls attached to each outer guy wire. MR. SCOTT answered four balls per guy wire. CHAIR EGAN remarked that Juneau's Taku winds would put "a heck of a drag on those guy wires." 2:16:24 PM MAX MCGRATH, Enterprise Technology Services, Manager for the State of Alaska Telecommunication System, Anchorage, Alaska, said he was available to answer questions on SB 177. 2:17:04 PM ERIC ERIKSEN, Vice President, Alaska Electric Light and Power (AELP), Juneau, Alaska, wanted to exclude electrical transmission towers from SB 177. He acknowledged the intent to protect public safety, but additional unintended consequences may be exposed without this exclusion. Implementing this type of marking on transmission towers would expose those towers and their electrical service to liability issues and endanger their personnel who are maintaining and implementing the devices on the towers that are very remote and at high elevations. 2:18:29 PM SENATOR DYSON said he assumed that transmission towers were already operating under strict rules near established airports that addressed the issue of aircraft encountering power lines and asked what they are required to do now. MR. ERIKSON answered before installing a new structure near an airport the permitting process has a review to determine whether additional navigational aid markings on maps or structure requirements like lighting are needed. The requirements lessen the farther away you get from the airport. For instance, the Snettisham lines went through FAA review since they are on federal property and they would place the necessary requirements on that line. 2:20:15 PM SENATOR DYSON observed that every transmission line in Alaska that crosses a river has balls on it. MR. ERIKSON said the Snettisham line does as well. SENATOR DYSON asked whose responsibility it was to get those lines on the maps and charts. MR. ERICKSON said those lines had been in existence for quite a while and he wasn't directly involved in their permitting, but his experience in permitting similar projects was that he provides the information to the entities that then will put it on the maps and charts. 2:21:53 PM BOB HAJDUKOVICH, President and CEO, Era Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska, said this issue came into his world when they started seeing a proliferation of cell towers and wind generation devices. He explained that meteorological towers (MET) are put up in advance of wind farms to measure wind speeds to determine their viability. They can go up very quickly and are very thin with invisible wires. So, there is an MET concern in the rural areas along with the proliferation of cell towers. The FAA does not require towers below 200 ft. tall to be registered and if they are not in the airport environment they are also unregulated. Era's concern is that the most likely place to put towers of any sort is near runways, especially in rural communities, because that's generally where the power, utilities, maintenance and roads are. Many communities they serve might have one or two roads that go through the entire town and so the most obvious place to put a cell tower or wind generator is on the path towards the runway. Probably most of the accidents that have happened in aviation occur with low level helicopter activities. The average height of carriers going into airports is generally 1500-2000 ft. in the immediate vicinity and goes down on approach to the runway, and that is where the FAA does its job of maintaining the obstruction clearances to make sure operators have an angled glide path. Generally, he said Era is not as concerned about the approaches to airports as much as they are about the approaches to communities. Private aviation in low weather conditions would tend to follow roads - like from Fairbanks to Anchorage - as opposed to looking out the front window for unmarked towers. So, it's important that the state engage in registration of all the new activity around cell towers and wind generators. They knew a lot of stakeholders would engage in this conversation and the electric folks had brought up some great points. 2:25:16 PM SENATOR FAIRCLOUGH said she served on Alaska's Renewable Energy Advisory Board that was permitting 23 projects now and that she would take this information to them and maybe get in front of this issue and then fix the cell tower problem through legislation. MR. SCOTT said he would reach out to that board. CHAIR EGAN said SB 177 would be held in committee.