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Cell towers are topics at meeting of fire board

By Staff | Jan 20, 2009

Lehigh Acres fireboard supervisors spent most of their monthly meeting last Thursday afternoon talking about two stealth communication towers for Verizon and T-Mobile. The towers would be constructed on property owned by the fire

district and revenue would go the coffers of the district, if an agreement is made.

Richard Pringle, the board’s attorney, who has been negotiating with Verizon, at the board’s direction, for the last couple of months said Verizon had gone

before a county hearing examiner but hit a snag because the fire department had wanted to put a small satellite dish on the tower for fire department

communications.

“They wouldn’t approve that,” Pringle told the board. Verizon wants to lease a site and built on the station grounds at Joel Blvd. and 10th St.

Fire Chief Don Adams said the dish was extremely important for emergency communication. A stealth tower is unlike some of the communication towers seen around the area. It is a strait tower and appears more like a tall pole.

It was suggested that the dish could be put inside in the big pole, but the chief said he wasn’t sure that would work.

Jackie Gwynn, project manager with Communication Development Services Inc., working on behalf of Verizon, said she was willing to go back to the county and ask for a variance as long as the fire district had a lease in place with Verizon. Commissioner Ralph Hemingway said he believed that the fire district should earn shared income from Verizon and Gwynn said sharing revenue could be

a possibility.

Pringle was asked to continue to work with Gwynn regarding the tower agreement.

Meanwhile John Banner, site acquisition manager with Glotel USA, representing T-Mobile, came asking for a lease to build a tower on property on Sunshine Blvd.,

now owned by the fire department. A future department is expected to be built on the site, but no plans have been made because of the ailing economy. Supervisors say that area is growing fast with residential homes.

Banner said he had talked with Rob Fowler about the possibility of leasing 1600 square feet of space at the site and said it was his understanding that it

would not interfere with space to build a new fire station in the future.

Fowler, the fire district’s project manager, was at the meeting and said the T-Mobile tower would work on the property, but Banner was told to go back to the county to make sure there was no impact from a future Lucket Rd. extension from I-75, which would cross near the site near 12th Street and Sunshine Blvd. Lucket is expected to stretch from the Interstate north to SR80 but no funds are available to build the thoroughfare through Lehigh now.

Later Fowler presented a construction management report for future construction at Station 102 on Homestead Rd., something the board has discussed in past meetings but has made no decisions because of the possibility of less impact money coming to the district due to the ailing economy.

Supervisors are considering replacing the existing facility with a full-size station and administration office, maintenance and training facilities large

enough for a meeting room of the supervisors’ public meetings.

But the proposed widening of Homestead Rd. to a four-lane highway will have an impact on what happens to the present fire station.

Part of Fowler’s plan in Option 1 included buying adjacent land to the station. A second option would be to redevelop the facility utilizing the existing site only. He offered conceptual budgets and timelines.

Fowler noted in his preliminary report that Sarah Clarke of the county department of transportation (DOT) was at the last meeting and presented an

illustration of the planned road widening work including the extent of the direct impact on the fire department site.

Clarke had said the plans available publicly to date do not show the location of the existing structure of the fire department, but they do indicate that the

existing points of ingress and egress will be maintained, something board members have insisted must be the case.

There is a canal crossing at the site near the fire station and Fowler noted that no engineering

review had been completed to determine adequacy of apparatus ingress and egress (turning capabilities) if the existing buildings remain and the road is widened to four lanes.

Board president Jeff Berndt conducted the meeting. Attending were Supervisors David Adams, Julie Barrett and Ralph Hemingway. Absent for the second month was Joel Guzman. Staff and Chief Don Adams were also present.