Over the last couple of months, we have shared with you 7 steps to a successful pole attachment audit and answered 6 FAQs of pole attachment audits. Over the next two months, we will discuss important Dos and Don’ts of pole attachment audits. As always, we’d love your feedback. Have a comment or question about what you read? Reach out to us!

DO Communicate and Share Information; DON’T Let One Party Drive the Process

As we noted in our e-book, there are gaps in joint use and pole attachment agreements. These gaps can be depicted by a hub-and-spoke relationship between the pole owner (generally the electric utility) and its attachers. The pole owner has a one-to-one relationship with each attacher, but the attachers generally do not have contractual relationships with each other, particularly as it relates to the electric utility’s service territory.

In the practical context of a pole attachment audit, it falls to the pole owner to act as the “common ground” for all entities that have attachments to poles on its system and to execute a comprehensive plan that works well for all parties. This often means finding “mutually agreeable” or reasonable solutions to issues that are not clearly – or consistently – handled by the various one-to-one contracts the pole owner has with each party. For example, all parties should share in the inspection cost of the inventory in a reasonable pro-rated way, even though all parties don’t have contracts with each other.

It often becomes the pole owner’s task to develop “extra-contractual” solutions all parties can support. To develop buy-in, the pole owner must communicate with all parties and share information with all parties, but it CANNOT let one party take over and drive the process for its own purposes without taking the full system (the common ground of the inspection) into account.

DO Take Pictures; DON’T Take Measurements

A pole is visited at one moment in time during an inspection. Poles exist in a changing physical world – an inspection itself is just a “snapshot” in time. In our experience, taking a picture of the pole is a very low-cost addition to any inspection and will save many return trips to the pole to confirm or deny the conditions that existed at the time of the inspection (and may have changed since the inspection was completed).

While pictures can be time-stamped, geo-tagged and printed or shared easily, the work of recording exact measurements typically creates significant additional expense and substantially slows the work of a pole attachment audit. Even the advent of new technologies (such as Ike and Leida tools) for this purpose create significant extra cost to pay for the device, subscription services, data storage and back office labor. The cost of these measurements are almost exclusively borne by the pole owner.

A pole attachment audit that seeks to respond to every wish or request for data starts to look like an over-decorated Christmas tree.

DO Record Easily Accessible Information; DON’T Throw in the Kitchen Sink

Often, pole attachment audits are years in the making and by the time a pole owner determines to do the audit, it has become a Christmas tree on which the engineering or mapping department has hung its entire wish list. While it is true that the bulk of the cost of any inspection is in getting an inspector safely to the pole and recording additional information can be done at a lower incremental cost than starting an inspection from scratch, recording every “nice to have” data point will add cost, slow the inspection, and create a data storage and access challenge. It is better to make a business case for additional data: How will you use the information? What value will it bring to the utility?

A simple cost-benefit analysis can help to quantify this additional work and expected value. If you do not have experience developing this analysis, hire a good consultant (like us!) that can help you quantify the costs and return to the pole owner.

DO Record Obvious Code Violations; DON’T Assign “Blame”

A competent pole attachment audit will include a record of obvious NESC violations. While a pole attachment audit moves quickly, it is a matter of public safety to record obvious clearance issues that need remediation. Pole owners should expect this information and have a plan to act on it.

That said, the act of remediating these issues is often multi-step and multi-party – in a word, complex. Because of the low-cost and high-speed nature of these inspections, it is beyond the inspector’s scope to sort out the resolution of these issues. Again, an inspection is a snapshot in time. It cannot record who attached to the pole first or what outside force occurred to the pole to create the current situation. This resolution should be worked out among the parties on the pole after the pole attachment audit. Declaring one party “at fault” without all the facts creates an unnecessary conflict that will slow the overall resolution process and is not in the interest of public safety.

We’ll be back with more Dos and Don’ts in August. In the meantime, feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or would like further discussion on pole attachment audits.

Dos & Don'ts of Pole Attachments / Part 1