Zoners: No To 160-Foot Cell Tower

In unanimous decisions Thursday night, the South Whitehall Zoning Hearing Board denied appeals to build a 160-foot cell tower at the , along the busy Hamilton By-Pass.

Liberty Towers LLC, of Rockville, Md., sought to build the tower for MetroPCS Communications Inc., a pre-paid wireless phone provider based in Texas that expanded into the Lehigh Valley last fall. 

The five-member zoning hearing board offered no explanation in denying both of Liberty Tower's requests for height and use variances.  

Attorney Melissa Murray Rigney, who represented Liberty Towers on Thursday night, said following the hearing that an appeal to federal court is likely, pending a review of the full court record.

Liberty Towers needed the use variance because the Dorneyville Shopping Center is in a highway commercial zone, which doesn't allow for wireless communications facilities. It needed a height variance because the township zoning ordinance does not allow a tower above 150 feet.

According to testimony presented at several hearings, the tower did not have to be 160 feet high to meet MetroPCS' needs. However, Liberty Towers anticipated that the tower would ultimately serve several carriers. 

Testimony on Thursday night centered on the number of parking spaces at the shopping center and whether the cell tower compound would eliminate too many of those spaces. The shopping center had been granted a variance on the number of parking spaces more than a decade ago, but must have 463 spaces, officials said.

In testimony before the board for Liberty Towers, Brian E. Seidel of Seidel Planning and Design in Pottstown said that the cell tower compound had been reduced in size by 10 feet from its initial design to accommodate those parking requirements.

Under the new design, he said, six parking spaces would be lost, but six more created in another section of the shopping center.

Questions were raised about whether two additional parking spaces would be needed because of the proposed construction.

Further complicating the count was testimony from zoning officer Keith Zehner, who said that three parking spaces were recently lost when shopping cart corrals went up outside a grocery store there. Seidel said he had spoken to representatives of the shopping center earlier in the day and that there was no indication that any parking spaces had been eliminated. 

Seidel acknowledged that garbage bins would have to be relocated to allow for the cell tower, but he said that Liberty Towers would work with the shopping center landlord to assure that no parking spaces would be affected.

MetroPCS has about 7.9 million customers nationwide. Previous testimony indicated that MetroPCS needs the cell tower to eliminate a coverage gap for its wireless customers in that high-traffic section of South Whitehall.