Cellular tower siting jurisprudence under the Telecommunications Act of 1996--the first five...

INTRODUCTION

In the Telecommunications Act of 1996 ("TCA"),' Congress comprehensively deregulated the then-emerging American cellular telecommunications industry. Against the overall system of deregulation, however, in a section entitled "Preservation of Local Zoning Authority,"2 Congress expressly preserved a degree of local power over cellular tower siting. In doing so, Congress sought to balance the national interest in rapid build-out of cellular telecommunications infrastructure against the established primacy of local control over land use-local control which itself, in the seventy years since Euclid v. Ambler Realty,3 had come to represent a situational balance of political forces against state law legal constraints.