The Municipalité régionale de comté (MRC) de D’Autray, located in the Lanaudière region northeast of Montreal, has submitted a Part 1 application asking the CRTC to clarify the rules regarding costs related to preparatory work on Bell poles to which the regional county municipality wants to attach.
In an application dated April 18 and posted to the CRTC’s website Tuesday, the MRC’s director of information systems and telecom services asks the commission to facilitate and to encourage Bell’s application of the provisions of the CRTC’s February 2023 telecom regulatory policy regarding costs associated with make-ready work on telco poles.
In Telecom Regulatory Policy 2023-31, the commission noted the absence of definitions of what constitutes make-ready work was contributing to delays in third-party attachers gaining access to telco poles and to attachers being charged for costs they should not be responsible for. The commission further said specific definitions in the support structure service tariffs would ensure attachers are held responsible for only the work and costs associated with their access requests. The commission said it was important to introduce a clear demarcation between the work required on poles to meet construction standards, i.e. corrective work, and all other types of make-ready work.
The commission’s policy outlined new definitions for make-ready work, including what constitutes complex and simple make-ready work, as well as for corrective work, both complex and simple. The policy also made it clear that the telcos owning the poles should bear the responsibility of keeping them up to construction standard. Incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) are compensated for the maintenance of their poles through the tariffed access rates, the commission noted.
The CRTC’s policy also stated if a pole has to be replaced due to either the pole being at the end of its useful life or a lack of adequate maintenance, it is the pole owner’s responsibility to remediate the situation.
In its Part 1 application, the D’Autray MRC says it has repeatedly asked Bell to review pole preparatory work in progress in order to adjust the costs actually attributable to the municipality in accordance with the CRTC’s February 2023 decision.
The MRC currently has several permit applications being processed with Bell, some requiring simple make-ready work and others complex preparatory work, with many requests submitted to Bell in 2023, says the municipality’s application to the CRTC.
After an examination of its open requests for pole make-ready work, the MRC “notes a strong propensity for Bell Canada to bill for work that turns out to be the responsibility of the owner,” says an English translation of the MRC’s application.
It says it has asked Bell to modify the requests in progress, as well as those that have not been billed and completed, to respect the recommendations of the CRTC’s decision regarding pole make-ready work. The MRC says Bell has specified that its application of the commission’s policy and its review of costs related to preparatory work will not result in any review of completed and invoiced requests.
The MRC says the longer Bell takes to implement the measures of the commission’s policy, the less likely Bell will be to assume the costs incumbent on it.
The MRC’s application asks the CRTC to: clarify that pole permit applications currently undergoing preparatory work be revised in accordance with the commission’s regulatory policy; correct current requests in collaboration between pole owners and applicants in order to know the fair contribution of the applicants; correct closed and completed requests so the contribution paid by the requesters is reimbursed; and clarify that Bell’s deadlines for implementation of the policy’s measures do not in any way relieve it of its responsibility to assume the costs incumbent on it, whatever the state of the application (closed or active) from the date of the CRTC decision.
Interested parties have until May 30 to submit interventions to the file.
