By Andrea Bruner, White River Now
The Batesville Planning Commission has approved a conditional use permit for a cell phone tower on the Lyon College campus, although at least one neighbor is not happy about it.
The only item on the commission’s July meeting agenda on Monday night was a review of the conditional use application.
Tracy Gill, who said he is a consultant who works from home and is also a planning commissioner in his home community of Maumelle, so he is familiar with the work the commission does.
He said he has worked with wireless phone providers since the early 1990s, and now much of his work is with tower companies, where cell phone service providers contract with a third party to build an antenna site. The cell phone company then hangs its antennas on the pole and leases that space, Gill said.
“So in this case, colleges, hospitals, high school campuses, large employers – any mass dense group of people – those groups of people as a whole are very high users of wireless infrastructure,” Gill said. “Consequently, in Batesville or areas like this, from a radio standpoint, they just suck up the radio signals. So, the areas on campus or near campus may have a lesser quality of the radio signal strength.”
He said, therefore, Verizon has contracted with a company called Towers, LLC, which is building the site and is a subsidiary of Vertical Bridge. The site is to be located on a 60-foot-by-60-foot square in the middle of the Lyon campus.
“They’re trying to get an antenna site that will shoot a signal in all directions right in the middle of the densest area,” Gill said.
The radio signal will permeate out from the campus, allowing radio traffic to flow to the next tower.
“If you’re driving through town, if you’re sitting at home watching TV, if you’re at your business running your business on wireless signals, if you’re at the campus, it’s kind of all the same,” Gill said. “With the new site right there on campus, it will take all that existing traffic that the campus and the immediate area are drawing, and it will pull that traffic off of the existing towers. So not only will it enhance the radio signal in the area of the campus, it will also provide extra capacity because it offloads all those users from the existing sites.”
Gill said The Towers signed a lease with Lyon for the space, and there may be other providers in the future to use the cell phone tower.
Gill also said under city ordinance, the cell phone tower is an allowed use in areas zoned as residential-1, subject to a conditional use permit. However, he said the ordinance asks for a vegetation buffer, but the Lyon campus security has asked to be able to see the site and instead seeks an eight-foot chain-link covered with black vinyl.
He said there may be three or four pine trees that will be removed for the project, but the nearby grove of trees will block some of the view of the tower from the neighbors. “You’ll see it a little bit more from a distance away,” Gill said. But he said, with Becknell Gym being located to the east of the tower, “nobody from the other side of the campus looking towards the west will see it.”
The tower will be 150 feet tall and located about 125 feet from the gym. The structure is designed to “flex” in the wind, and in the event of horrific winds or tornadoes, it is designed to have a fail point where it bends over, Gill said.
“So even in a tornado or a straight-line wind, it wouldn’t fall over onto the gymnasium,” he said. “It’s designed to have what I call a crinkle point.”
He said the tower is monitored remotely with underground utilities, as the college did not want any overhead utilities.
He also said there will be no noise from the antenna unless a generator is in use.
He did say the neighbors were notified of the planning commission’s public hearing as part of its regular July meeting.
Dr. Pat Jackson asked to address the commission. She said she has lived on 23rd Street since 1959, and that the tower would be about 400 feet from her street. She asked what would happen if the trees started dying, since they were donated to the college.
“The people next door to me when they lived there actually donated them to Lyon, and that’s where those pine trees came from,” she said, adding, “They are supposed to stay there and not be removed. So, I’m just saying that out of respect for them. They’re both deceased, and yes, the college owns that property now, but … it’s a beautiful spot. We don’t want it to deteriorate.”
The planning commission agreed to waive the requirement for vegetation at the request of the college, acknowledging security concerns, and approved the conditional use with the waiver.
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