Providing Easement to Phone Company
Jeremy Greene
providing an easement on your property for the phone company's use? My
family has property in rural Vermont and Bell Atlantic would like a
30' x 30' easement to install a fiber optic cabinet (fiber to copper
SLC). The stated purpose is to accomodate increasing growth in demand
for phone service. The area is in the corner of a hayfield. It is
about 3 miles from the CO. Bell is offering $2000.
Where would I do research to see if this is an appropriate amount?
Should we ask for some free phone lines too? Also, members of the
family are concerned about the possibility of sitting a cell tower
nearby. Would it be reasonable to include language in the contract
barring them from using these fiber optic facilities to serve any
wireless service providers? Any other issues to consider?
Thanks,
Jeremy
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Do not get too greedy in your demands.
Telco is willing to pay you some amount of money less than what it
would cost their lawyer to file necessary papers for condemnation to
take over what is needed. Generally the courts are sympathetic to the
necessity of occassionally crossing over someone's land for the
purpose of achieving some good benefit for the public, and in the case
in point, if telco really has no other way to get where they need to
be to serve the public I can tell you almost with total certainty the
court will rule in their favor if such a relatively tiny amount of
space in an otherwise remote, distant corner of a large hay field is
involved.
If telco has stated they intend to restore anything damaged as a result
of their excavating, construction, etc, and that your business of
growing hay will be only slightly and temporarily disrupted and that
the finished work will not be an eyesore either to yourself or your
neighbors and will not otherwise devalue your property or harm your
business, then I would venture to say the court -- if it came to
that point -- would rule for telco and sign off on condemnation of
the property as needed.
I think you can rightfully ask for compensation to the extent the land
is valued; whatever the 'going price' is for an acre (or that many
square feet) of land could be reasonably demanded along with some
additional amount of money to cover your out-of-pocket expenses during
the transition for things like road closures, or construction equip-
ment which otherwise occupied other parts of your land, etc. But
the court, at least in theory, is supposed to be a place of equity,
a place of fairness. The court dislikes being a collection agency for
your family. I would not ask for some ongoing favorable treatment,
i.e. free phone service. A one time settlement is best. Do not be
afraid to speak agressively to telco's attorney (some corporate
attornies have a way of being terribly frightful to the general
public when they bluster and posture in an arrogant way, which I
guess is how the corporation wants them to appear) but bear in mind
that unless telco made some totally outrageous demand, i.e. they
want a hundred acres, have no intention of making it esthetically
pleasing, and want to pay you a dollar for the whole thing, chances
are the court will rule favorably for them, accepting their word
and their evaluation of the whole matter.
Understand also that a cellular phone tower way out in a farmer's
field somewhere is not the same as a cellular tower situated on
someone's front lawn in the town itself, or in the playground of
a school or somewhere that the entire community has to look at it
all day or where if it fell over in a storm or similar the community
would be endangered. If telco says 'we are trying to work with the
community in how we locate our facilities, keeping them out of
general view and looking nice' then you know the court will give
them what they want. With all the above to think about, make your
counter-offer to telco, but do not get greedy or you will come out
to be the loser. Telco has lots of experience in these matters. PAT]
John R. Levine
> 30' x 30' easement to install a fiber optic cabinet (fiber to copper
> SLC). The stated purpose is to accomodate increasing growth in demand
> for phone service. The area is in the corner of a hayfield. It is
> about 3 miles from the CO. Bell is offering $2000.
You could try and bargain them up some, but that sounds about right
for a cabinet that doesn't impair other uses of your field. I think
that half the farms in Vermont have utility easements of one sort or
another. When I owned a wood lot in the Northeast Kingdom, there were
several. Keep in mind that if you give them a hard time, they could
take you to court and use eminent domain to force an easement from you
at a price set by the court.
> Where would I do research to see if this is an appropriate amount?
Try asking the PUC people in Montpelier. They're pretty reasonable.
> Should we ask for some free phone lines too? Also, members of the
> family are concerned about the possibility of sitting a cell tower
> nearby. Would it be reasonable to include language in the contract
> barring them from using these fiber optic facilities to serve any
> wireless service providers?
No. Bell is a common carrier, they have to serve anyone who asks them.
Actually, I'd think that a cell tower in a corner of my rural hayfield
would be great. The health risks are zero (the total power is about a
hundred watts, compared to the 10 to 100 kilowatts that a broadcast
station uses) and you can get rents of a thousand bucks a month. If
you get one, make sure that you require that they let other carriers
co-locate and that you get a share of the colo rentals.
John R. Levine, IECC, POB 727, Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869
jo...@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl,
Member, Provisional board, Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail
Dale Farmer
> Can anyone comment on the legal (or any other) implications of
> providing an easement on your property for the phone company's use? My
> family has property in rural Vermont and Bell Atlantic would like a
> 30' x 30' easement to install a fiber optic cabinet (fiber to copper
> SLC). The stated purpose is to accomodate increasing growth in demand
> for phone service. The area is in the corner of a hayfield. It is
> about 3 miles from the CO. Bell is offering $2000.
Well, unless they are burying the thing, you won't be able to grow
stuff there anymore, I suggest an lease or selling it outright.
The easement means that they pay you once and they have those rights
forever. Or is the easement for access to a cabinet that is being
built on land owned by somebody else? If the land is being taken
out of production for the foreseeable future, then you should sell
or long term lease the land. Also check the language on the lease
to see if it obligates you to do anything else. Things like
keeping the access road plowed and repaired year round. Something
like that pushes it to the long term lease being more preferable.
Remember, the easement is nearly forever.
An accaintance of mine bought an old house in a town
adjacent to Boston. There was nothing on the deed about a phone
company easment. He needed to put in lots of phone lines.
(Ultimately eight POTS lines and two T-1s) He noticed in the
basement that he had a 24 pair cable coming in, that the existing
phone service came in on. He smiles and figures that he is all
set. Nope. When he ordered more lines, he was told that there
was no available pairs on his street. He says "There is 23 pairs
more coming into my basement." Those are available. To make a
long story short, the cable in his basement was the point for
all the phone service on his end of the street.
So after much to-ing and fro-ing, he dresses up in his weirdest
clothes, has a couple of prospective housemates also dress up weird,
and they follow the wires from his house to all his neihbors and
introduces himself, and apologizes in advance in case their phone
service is disrupted by the remodeling. This causes the neighbors to
ask why, and the story comes out. Enough of them are outraged by the
fact that they could have been eavesdropped easily and call the telco,
the city council, and mayor. *grin* The telco put in new outside
plant cable in just a few weeks later to the street, And had to give
up their easment into his basement, which had been in place from
sometime in the 1800s.
--Dale
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: In older neighborhoods in large cities
like Chicago, you will find numerous examples of boxes in basements
(mostly of older highrise apartment buildings) which serve the phones
in other buildings up and down the street. There is a lot of history
behind how those situations came to be, but it invariably goes back to
an era when 'things were different' in society. Fifty years ago -- and
much of telco's outside plant goes back that far -- wooden boxes with
a simple latch on the door would be located in an apartment building.
Sufficient pairs on the cable to serve the switchboard for the
building (there were 'house pairs' from that point to the various
apartments) would be attached there, and the cable then taken along to
the building next door and its switchboard, etc. There was a very
large building boom in the 1920-30's in Chicago, when most of the
older highrises still around today were constructed, and even though
in their foresight at the time, there were lots of spare pairs in the
cables, which were multipled, or opened at each location to allow for
'all the expansion which would ever be needed', they had no idea of
the changes in phone usage which would occur by 1960-70. Up until
about that time, every highrise apartment building with few exceptions
had a 'front desk' clerk and a switchboard. Rarely did a tenant in
the building have a 'private, direct' phone. Most of those buildings
also offered maid service to the tenants.
As society changed and the financial circumstances changed for the
owners of the buildings, the first thing they did was drop the
maid service. Over a period of about ten years beginning in the
middle 1960's the next thing they got rid of were the front desk
clerks and the switchboards. If a tenant wanted phone service, let
them get it direct from telco. Where telco previously used only ten
or twelve pairs to serve the switchboard, now they had to rewire
those basement boxes to come up with fifty or sixty pairs for the
tenants. Typically the 'house pairs' were just wired straight through
to the cable pairs, but it took some creativity moving spare pairs
around up and down the street to get the job done.
I lived in a building in 1978, which until 1965 had used a switch-
board. The building was originally constructed in 1915, with an
additional section of twelve more apartments added in 1929. The box in
the basement was a *huge* wooden cabinet with numbered strips
indicating which cable pair was attached where, and the interesting
item was a group of pairs terminating on one of the strips which were
bundled together and vanished down into a metal conduit that went into
the basement floor. They were held together with some string tied
around them and a little tag on the string. In the most exquisite,
1930-ish handwriting, still quite legible, was the message 'these 25
pairs are all terminated in the new building at (street address a
block away), on the switchboard, June 15, 1931' ... and signed by a
telco installer, long since dead I am sure, who followed Bell System
rules by making sure the pairs were properly identified. That building
a block away pulled out its switchboard at least 25 years ago also.
Most people who live in large, inner-city neighborhoods would be
outraged if they knew how many places around the neighborhood their
phone pair was available in the basement of some other old building.
The reason they do not know however is because telco operates under
the same theory as early Unix sysadmins: (let's all say it together
in unison) "Security through obscurity". Which of your neighbors has
even the vaguest idea, the foggiest notion, of how telco operates?
How many of them even care?
Perhaps readers will recall an article I published here in the Digest
about ten years ago. It was and is my all-time favorite easement
story. In a Chicago suburb, a man and his wife operated a telephone
answering service from their home for about twenty years, during the
1960-80 time period. They retired, died, whatever, sold the house and
went out of business. A woman buys the house and moves in. She makes
what was the former work area for the answering service into one of
her bedrooms. She gets curious about a 'strange looking box' in one
of the closets which appears that it had not been opened for at least
ten years and in fact was stuck shut because it had been painted.
She manages to get it to come open after prying it with a screw
driver, and finds 'dozens of wires' inside, as she later reported to
the {Chicago Tribune}.
The Tribune's investigation found out about the answering service
which had been located there years before, and furthermore, that
Illinois Bell **had easement rights to that closet in her bedroom**
granted to them back in the answering service days. The answering
service dated from an era when all such services had a literal pair of
wires from each subscriber, like an 'extension phone', where the
subscriber's pairs in the central office were 'jumped' or bridged to
pairs which went out to the answering service premises. If the service
got a new customer, all telco had to do to hook it up was come out to
that box in the answering service office (now the lady's bedroom) and
swap a couple of wires, and do the corresponding switch of wires at
the central office. Now in more recent years, those pairs were in use
all over the immediate vicinity. Most of the neighbors had never
heard of the answering service, it having been gone for years before
they moved in the area.
So technically, telco had easement rights in that lady's bedroom to
come and go as they wished, although someone at Illinois Bell said
they had forgotten about that junction box also, which is why it
had not been opened in years. Telco went out and cut off the under-
ground where it entered the house with all those pairs and and
relocated the rest of the neighborhood. The times certainly change.
New telco outside plant is much more secure, but it will be many
years before all of the older stuff has been replaced. PAT]
Danny Burstein
<cell...@earthlink.net> writes:
> Can anyone comment on the legal (or any other) implications of
> providing an easement on your property for the phone company's use? My
> family has property in rural Vermont and Bell Atlantic would like a
> 30' x 30' easement ... [snip]
In addition to the points raised by our Esteemed Moderator, I'd suggest a
sunset period to the easement. Otherwise you may find yourself, or your
heirs, facing a mess twenty or fifty years from now.
I would guess that something like a ten year cap would probably be a
realistic starting point.
____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Jeremy Greene
> Jeremy Greene wrote:
>> Can anyone comment on the legal (or any other) implications of
>> providing an easement on your property for the phone company's use? My
>> family has property in rural Vermont and Bell Atlantic would like a
>> 30' x 30' easement to install a fiber optic cabinet (fiber to copper
>> SLC). The stated purpose is to accomodate increasing growth in demand
>> for phone service. The area is in the corner of a hayfield. It is
>> about 3 miles from the CO. Bell is offering $2000.
> Well, unless they are burying the thing, you won't be able to grow
> stuff there anymore, I suggest an lease or selling it outright.
> The easement means that they pay you once and they have those rights
> forever. Or is the easement for access to a cabinet that is being
> built on land owned by somebody else? If the land is being taken
> out of production for the foreseeable future, then you should sell
> or long term lease the land. Also check the language on the lease
> to see if it obligates you to do anything else. Things like
> keeping the access road plowed and repaired year round. Something
> like that pushes it to the long term lease being more preferable.
> Remember, the easement is nearly forever.
Actually, my family doesn't use the field for anything; it's not a
farm anymore. So it has no commercial value to us. The cabinet will be
located on the easement; there's no other landowner involved.
The field abuts a public road. There is a creek/drainage ditch between
the field and the road. It's actually going to be a neat little piece
of engineering -- the utility poles are on the other side of the
road. So the fiber will come down the pole, under the road in a
conduit, and then there will be a footbridge across the ditch which
the conduit will presumably be attached to. The conduit will continue
underground, through a hedgerow, and ends at the edge of the
field. The SLC and associated equipment will sit on a concrete
platform and little trees will be planted around the whole
apparatus. Bell's trucks will park in a small area of grass off the
road. Bell says they will take responsibility for maintaining access.
> [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note:
> Most people who live in large, inner-city neighborhoods would be
> outraged if they knew how many places around the neighborhood their
> phone pair was available in the basement of some other old building.
> The reason they do not know however is because telco operates under
> the same theory as early Unix sysadmins: (let's all say it together
> in unison) "Security through obscurity". Which of your neighbors has
> even the vaguest idea, the foggiest notion, of how telco operates?
> How many of them even care?
It's not just in old buildings either. A fairly new building I used to
work in had a 150-pair cable that terminated in a utility closet
accessible to my company. When a business in the building disconnected
a line, Bell Atlantic might show up to undo the cross-connect in the
telephone room, but they would never disconnect the splice up on the
utility pole where the 150-pair meets the main feeder cable. So
whoever gets assigned that pair is probably unaware that their line is
bridge-tapped in my building and perhaps several other buildings as
well. Seems like poor plant management to do things that way, but I
guess it saves time and money. Kind of like the way that they don't
bother putting locks on the large terminal cabinets that sit next to
the roadway, even though the door to the cabinet is designed to be
locked.
-Jeremy
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: There is one thing you said a few
paragraphs above that I feel you should **never say again** to anyone.
That was your line, 'It has no commercial value to us'. If telco
finds out that is how you feel about it, then that is exactly the
amount they will want to pay. :) PAT]
bel...@foshay.citilink.com
> New telco outside plant is much more secure, but it will be many
> years before all of the older stuff has been replaced. PAT]
I don't know about new installations being more secure.
In 1995, US West installed a 50 pair cable directly to my house. I have
this huge enclosure on the side of my house with 50 pairs of screw
terminals. (Why they didn't use 66 blocks I'll never know) I watched
the line being installed, and it goes directly to my house bypassing all
the pedestals serving the other neighbors.
Now, the line was spliced to an existing 100 pair about 500 feet away.
(The neighborhood was served by the other 50 pairs) I wired all 50 pairs
into my basement, as I planned to use them all. By chance, I noticed that
one supposedly unused pair had dialtone. It turns out that pair is
actually the neighbor's phone line. I could hear anything on that line!
Brian