Agenda - Planning Commission - 01/09/2014

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Zoning Bulletin October 25, 2013 I Volume 7 I Issue 20 "[b]ecause [the City's] written decisions did not include any reasoning." The court also concluded that the conditional approval of the application for the third proposed location was effectively a denial, which also failed to satisfy the writing requirement because it did not set forth any reasons for imposing the conditions it listed. The court remanded the matter. Postremand, the City sent letters detailing the reasons for its two denials and one conditional approval. T-Mobile then asked the court to reconsider the matter. It argued that remanding the matter to the City violated the Telecommunication Act's requirement that these cases be decided on an expedited basis. T-Mobile argued that a permanent injunction requiring the City to grant the peiinit applications was the only proper remedy for a violation of the § 332(c)(7)(B)(iii) writing requirement. The court agreed. It concluded that an injunction requiring approval of the applications was the proper remedy for a violation of the Telecommunication Act's writing requirement. The City appealed. DECISION: Judgment of district court reversed, and matter remanded. The United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, found that the City's reasons for its denials and conditional approvals of T-Mobile's application were "detailed in the 181-page transcript of the [C]ity [C]ouncil's hearings on the applications and in the sixty-five pages of minutes of the Council's meeting and those hearings." Interpreting the words of the Telecommunications Act provision that denials of cell tower construction permit applications be "in writing" —the court found it was "sufficient" for the decision to be "contained in a different written document or documents that the applicant is given or has ac- cess to"; it need not be detailed in a "separate writing" or in a "writing separate from the transcript of the hearing and the minutes of the meet- ing .in which the hearing was held" or "in a single writing that itself contains all of the grounds and explanations for the decision." Rather, held the court, all of the written documents should be considered col- lectively, in deciding if the decision, whatever it must include, is in writing. Thus, here, the written documents available to T-Mobile col- lectively satisfied the writing requirement of the Telecommunications Act, § 332(c)(7)(B)(iii). Those documents included: transcripts of the planning commission's hearings (one on each application), which included the recommendations the planning commission made and the reasons it made them; transcripts of the City Council's hearings (one on each application) recounting the motions that were made and the reasons that were given for denying or conditionally approving each of the applications; and the letters the City sent to T-Mobile stating that ©2013 Thomson Reuters 7