Citing health hazards, aesthetics and threats to their property values, a group of Oak Harbor residents is united to fight the building of a 120-foot cell tower in their neighborhood.
Atlas Towers, of Boulder, Colo., is seeking the county’s permission to erect the tower on behalf of Verizon Wireless, with the possibility of serving several additional carriers in the future.
It would be located on a vacant five-acre parcel near the intersection of Thunder Lane and West Clover Valley Road, surrounded by a barbed wire-topped chain-link fence and adjacent to a small building housing a diesel generator.
“This tower is not in keeping with the area,” said Shannon Stone, a Thunder Lane resident who is among those leading the resistance.
“The site is near Gallery Golf Course and Rocky Point Park,” she noted, and so “should be kept rural.”
Eighteen neighbors have signed a petition against it.
The group has made its comments part of the official record and is fighting hard. In a detailed letter to the county, it said a 2006 study showed property values declined by up to 21 percent when a cell tower base station was built in the neighborhood. Only a few trees on the site are 80 feet tall, the group said, though county code requires that to be the average height of the surrounding trees.
The community has not been kept in the loop, and the tower won’t benefit area residents, they said.
They added that, rather than building a new tower, Verizon could use one of the numerous other cell towers in the area for its antenna. The new tower would beam RF energy into homes on a bluff 200 feet away, they said.
Atlas in its filings has maintained that the area’s “coverage is reaching capacity limits” and has argued that the tower will “enhance the value of the surrounding property with advanced wireless communications capability.” The tower is a permitted use of land zoned rural, and it won’t create “any reasonable public-health concerns,” Atlas said.
The group appears to face an uphill battle.
The county’s building department has said it has no objections, so long as Atlas gets a building permit. The public works department has OK’d construction if Atlas gets state permission to cut the trees on the property, properly deals with stormwater run-off and prevents erosion during construction.
But the outcome is not assured. In a May 18 letter to Atlas from the county’s planning and development department, Senior Planner Michelle Pezley said the company must submit a landscaping plan, ensure that trees surrounding the tower will be of adequate height, demonstrate a good-faith effort to show why Verizon can’t use another cell tower instead and — perhaps most importantly — respond to the neighbors’ concerns.
It must supply that information by July 1 or explain why it can’t.
