Now that you've got "cell sites," what do you do with them? The smart money says your jurisdiction is collecting property taxes on them. Only trouble is: many of you don't know what they're worth, some of you don't even tax them and – get this – most of you are missing some on the tax rolls.

As part of a Wireless Master Plan that Kreines & Kreines, Inc. is preparing with staff in a Florida County, we joined hands with the Building Department, Assessor's Office and Emergency Management Services. Here's what the group of us found:

• All kinds of cell sites, "towers" and antennas, whips, etc. Some had permits, some were recorded by the Assessor and some were unknown.
• The first thing we did was to urge the County to establish a fiber optic link between the Assessor and the permit counter in the Building Department.
• And then the Building Department got GIS that matched the Assessor's GIS, and we started to discover things.
• Fortunately, we had a paramedic who was on "light duty" (no heavy lifting), so he went all over the County and recorded on film and database every "tower" he could find. (There were many that no one at the County offices knew about.)

So what's the bottom line? The assessor figures he found $1.5 million in annually uncollected taxes so far.

And that's just the beginning. The Assessor has been appraising most "towers" on the value of the steel alone. It's not his fault: Because people call them "towers," he figured that's the tangible asset that gets assessed – a tower. Then he graduated to understanding all those funny panels and whips, dishes and cables … so, those got assessed. Then we introduced him to the equipment (hint: that's where the money is). Needless to say, the assessor's calculators are still increasing the assessed value of each "tower."