Story from YES! Weekly
By Jordan Green
AT&T WANTS TO
LIFT BAN ON NEW CELL-PHONE TOWERS IN RESIDENTIAL AREAS OF WINSTON-SALEM
WINSTON-SALEM--- AT&T
Mobility Corp. and American Towers LLC are
requesting to lift a ban on new cell-phone transmission towers.
Telecom
giant AT&T and American Towers LLC, is a company that builds cell-phone
towers and leases space to service providers. They presented a plan to
members of the Winston-Salem
Neighborhood Alliance in August in hopes that the proposal will go through
in the coming months.
Hopes for a successful proposal
The use of mobile phones has been increasing immensely while need for
landlines have been dropping.
“The issue behind
this ordinance is that over the past decade as people have been substituting
land lines for exclusive use of mobile phones…” said Kirk Erickson, the lead
planner for the text amendment in the planning department.
“The radius of
coverage of each tower is lower than it used to be. Our current ordinance
doesn’t allow towers in single-family areas except for the future-growth and
rural areas of the county. They need to get these towers where their customers
live and are using the phone service.”
The proposed
amendment goes before the City/County Planning Board on Thursday. The
nine-member planning board will recommend for or against adoption of the
amendment, but Winston-Salem City Council will make the final decision.
AT&T creates a strategy
AT&T invested
more than $250 million in its wireless and wire-line networks in North Carolina
in the first six months of 2013, company spokesman Clifton Metcalf
said.
The telecom
company’s interest in improving infrastructure in Forsyth County tracks with a
nationwide trend that has seen wireless use double from 2010-11 to 1.1 trillion
megabytes of data in 2011-12 while 30 percent of Americans have dropped
land-line service.
Metcalf added that
more than 75 percent of 911 calls in Forsyth County are currently made using
wireless devices.
Metcalf said the
number of new towers or antennas needed by AT&T to adequately meet its
customers’ needs is an “evolving” number, and the information is considered
proprietary to the company.
He said the
preference of AT&T is to have two or more companies place their antennas on
the same tower to minimize intrusion into residential communities, adding that
American Towers LLC would lease space to AT&T and other service providers.
Raising Apprehensions
“The existing ordinance requires that any new
tower construction be built for co-location,” said Liz Hill, director of government
affairs for American Towers LLC. “That’s in the existing law, and we didn’t
change it. That’s a common business practice. We own the tower; we lease to
other carriers. That’s the goal — to lease to as many providers as possible.”
Hill added that
fire departments and emergency medical services can also lease tower space.
Metcalf added that
wherever possible, AT&T tries to place antennas on water towers or bell
towers, or in faux pine trees so that they blend into the landscape.
The proposed text
amendment incentivizes shorter, concealed towers of 150 feet or less by
subjecting them to a more streamlined approval process through a zoning review
in residential neighborhoods. In contrast, the siting of taller towers would
require a special use permit from the board of adjustment.
Unanswered Questions
The proposed
amendment also adds language to require that concealed towers on vacant lots be
set back to a distance equivalent to their height or a minimum of 100 feet.
“As staff we’ve already worked
with the petitioner to try and reach a compromise point that we’re satisfied
with so that the ordinance provides safeguards for the neighborhoods,” Ericson
said. “There’s an opportunity to change the ordinance further if that’s what
the appointed and elected officials want to do.”
Eric Bushnell,
president of the Winston-Salem
Neighborhood Alliance, said the organization’s membership will ask the
Planning Board to remand the matter back to staff to get more input from the
public.
“The cell-phone
industry proposal raises two big questions which Winston-Salem Neighborhood
Alliance members strongly believe should be answered by communitywide
conversation,” Bushnell said in an e-mailed statement.
“Do Winston- Salem
residents want cell towers in their residential neighborhoods, at all? If
residents want cell towers in their neighborhoods, how would they decide where
to put the towers?”
Image by Weather Blog: Winston-Salem
WANNA go?
The
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Planning Board meets on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. in
the public meeting room on the 5th floor of the Bryce Stuart Municipal
Building, located at 100 E. 1st St. in Winston-Salem.
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