More on cell towers

Eagle Editorial
Published: July 3, 2008

It caught our eye earlier this year when it was noted that the Madison County Planning Commission was set to consider 10 – repeat 10 — special use permit applications related to cell phone towers. These applications were scheduled to be examined at the commissionn’s June meeting and we previewed this as a lead story in our May 29 edition.

Ten new big outdoor cell tower additions seemed a large number for a rural area like Madison County – even if this could conceivably be explained away by a rush to catch up with the times (most would concede cell phone reception has stayed fairly spotty here). These 10 applications varied a bit – some were for erecting completely new 199-foot tall cell phone towers (euphemistically called “monopoles”), while others were for adding cell phone antennas to existing structures.

Still, that number –10 – was an attention getter. It signaled that Madison County was approaching a significant crossroads and it begged several questions. Was it a sign that the county was going to fully embrace most any and every cell phone tower — to do most anything to yield the quickest and easiest improvements in cell phone reception? Or, was it just the opposite – would so many cell phone tower applications be viewed as a sort of tsunami that would wash away Madison County’s prized scenic beauty and prompt an anti-cell tower backlash?

And why just be either a pure proponent or opponent of cell phone towers? What about a compromise course? Why not allow selective cell tower expansion, but require that new cell towers blend into their surrounding environments?

For example, camouflage them to look like pine trees and have real pine trees planted around them and hide their equipment enclosures in faux boulders. As stated in our June 19 editorial, this is the course we favor. Further, we believe that it is the one held by the majority of Madison County citizens.

Yet this logical compromise course is one that key officials seem reluctant to even publicly acknowledge exists, choosing instead to create smokescreens implying that The Eagle is somehow journalistically incompetent to even report the issue.

“How can it (the planning commission’s June meeting) be reduced to an issue that only had one opponent after being advertised on the agenda for eight months?” asked Madison County Planning Commission Chairman Rodney Lillard in a June 19 letter to The Eagle.

The chairman overlooked the community ire his panel created by going against the “comp plan,” a sort of guide created to shepherd the county’s development. As three Eagle letter writers have indicated in recent weeks, allowing new uncamouflaged cell phone towers violates this plan.

He also seems to justify the OK of uncamouflaged towers because, as he writes in his Eagle letter, “On each case, there was only one person at the public comment portion of the process to speak in opposition.”

If you want more thoughtfully constructed, camouflaged cell phone towers, rather than those bare, steel monster ones, you should view the chairman’s preceding statement as a call to action. Let the planning commission members and the board of supervisors know what you think – they are your representatives. In this case, silence is not golden. It’s a giant, multi-appendaged steel tower blocking that scenic Madison County view you so prize.