A wireless provider seeking more favorable location guidelines for cell tower sites in Columbus will have to wait until next month to find out if its request will be granted.
C Spire has asked the Columbus Planning Commission to recommend to the city council that the city amend its cell tower code, which prohibits towers from being constructed in residential and neighborhood commercial districts. The ordinance, as it stands, only allows a tower to be placed in a commercial, agricultural or industrial zoning district.
Four of six members present for this month’s planning commission meeting voted in support of the request. That’s not enough votes to give a formal recommendation to the city council, however. The commission cannot approve or deny requests. It can only recommend that the council deny or approve a request.
The council last week chose to send the matter back to the planning commission. The matter will again go before the planning commission next month.
The commission’s vote on another amendment to the ordinance, which would mandate towers to be separated from homes by a minimum of 150 percent of the tower’s height, was also 4-2. That request will be heard once more by the commission as well.
Commission members Chuck Bigelow, Wythe Rhett, Larry Fuller and Quinn Brislin voted to recommend council approval of eliminating the restriction. Annette Savors and MacArthur Inge voted not in favor.
Rhett said he voted in favor of eliminating the prohibition of towers in residential areas because the fact that applications must still require the approval of both the commission and the council is enough of a buffer to prevent a tower being placed in a location that would compromise safety or become a nuisance.
“If a tower was 200 feet high, you’d have to have a 300-foot clearance on all sides,” Rhett said. “You would give very few places inside the city limits (where a tower would be allowed). We felt like under that scenario, if the neighborhood came out in opposition of it, we would be able to not allow it. It’s not a blanket type deal. They would have to come back and make an application for anywhere they wanted to go in a residential district.”
Not just towers
C Spire Media Relations Senior Manager Dave Miller said the company has looked at potential sites in residential zones. However, this does not mean they would seek to locate towers in those areas.
“Everyone looks at cell sites and they say, ‘It’s a tower,'” Miller said. “There’s no foregone conclusion that this would be a tower. If you look at how most cell sites are designed today, they’re not towers at all. They’re usually some type of a monopole or something that’s friendly to the environment and to the area that’s surrounding it. It needs to be compatible with that. It depends on what the circumstances are.”
Miller declined to discuss where those locations are, saying that requesting the amended ordinance language was the first hump the company had to jump through to get to that point.
“It would be premature to talk about that until we get the broader policy issue dealt with, which is right now the way the ordinance is written, it precludes even applications being submitted in residential areas,” Miller said. “We’ve looked at sites in other areas where they’re currently allowed. Right now, based on what the demand is and where our customers are telling us they need service, there’s no compatibility there. We determine very carefully when and where we decide to make requests for additional cell sites because it is not inexpensive to do it. We also want to minimize any potential impact, so in Columbus, we look at commercial areas first to see if that will work. If that doesn’t work, then we have to look at other alternatives.”
The range of coverage from a cell site varies based on environmental factors, mainly the height of the structure compared to a nearby treeline. However, technology for additional signal sites is not limited to towers or standalone poles but can also be installed on structures already in place such as water towers, rooftops and utility poles.
“There’s all kinds of different options that wireless providers use to try to minimize the impact and avoid that perception of, ‘There’s another big steel tower going up somewhere,'” Miller said.
The planning commission’s next meeting will be held at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall Nov. 11.
Nathan Gregory covers city and county government for The Dispatch.
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