The White Salmon City Council approved revisions to the municipal code chapter on telecommunications towers and facilities during its Nov. 18 regular meeting. The amendments to the code add provisions which allow for the city council to more closely regulate the process of leasing city-owned property to wireless operators.
The approved revisions also change the body tasked with reviewing appeals on Planning Commission decisions on such towers and facilities from the city council to a hearing examiner.
Efforts to revise the land use code chapter stem from a proposal by Oregon RSA No. 2, a U.S. Cellular subsidiary, to lease a city-owned plot of land and to grant easement onto the property for a potential cell tower location on Strawberry Mountain Road. The proposal came before City Council during an Aug. 19 meeting, but was taken off the agenda upon staff recommendation, citing additional information that was needed. City Council debated allowing discussion over the proposal and potential action that night and City Clerk Jan Brending noted that some interested members of the community may not have attended the meeting, presuming the item would be removed. Council then voted to remove the item.
Mayor Marla Keethler suggested that the city operations committee review the code chapter, starting the process of code revision. In an interview with Columbia Gorge News, Keethler said that the revisions allow for more public and council participation in the decision-making process.
Keethler said the way the original code was written did not afford city council the ability to review specific details about a proposed tower that would be located on city property. In the amended code, parties proposing a ground lease option to the city council must include a proposed site plan, a suitability study, and a description of the tower, among other details, in their proposal.
Keethler also said that changing the appellate body on planning commission decisions from city council to hearing examiner allows for an impartial body, since city council would have already voted in some way and discussed the project before it reached the Planning Commission.
“That old way puts the council in an awkward position,” Keethler said. With the revisions, “whether you’re happy or not, everyone is walking away thinking that it was afair process,” she said.
The revisions do not affect the process for making land use decisions, which come before the Planning Commission; instead, the revisions affect the process to establish a lease with the city. The original proposal requested a lease with the city as a first step in a multi-step process to install a cell tower on city-owned property. As city attorney Kenneth Woodrich noted during the Aug. 19 meeting, the ground lease would be object to the lessee obtaining all the necessary permits before moving forward, which would also include a public hearing in front of the planning commission.
Keethler told Columbia Gorge News that during the process of code revision, the entity proposing the ground lease pulled their proposal from consideration.
“I would say that it matches better the desires of the city,” Keethler said. “This government is supposed to be representing and bringing forward … the direction residents wants to take the city.”
Commented