Tough Tower Ordinance Restricts Site Development
The town of Clinton in northwest New Jersey may be small, but when it comes to cell towers, it’s thinking even smaller. The town of more than 2,600 people has passed a cell tower ordinance that is as comprehensive as it is restrictive.

Along with restricting cell towers to commercial and office districts, the ordinance restricts single-user towers to a height of 100 feet and multi-user towers to 120 feet. All future towers would have to be concealed to blend in with the surrounding architecture or foliage.

Towers would also require a separation of 300 feet or 300 percent of the tower height from residences and municipal buildings. Accessory buildings would be limited to 200 square feet of floor space and 10 feet in height. And future tower development would only be allowed if collocation were not found to be possible.

PCIA—The Wireless Infrastructure Association and the New Jersey Wireless Association called aspects of Clinton’s new rules “extremely onerous,” The size and height of equipment structure limits do not work, PCIA/NJWA argued, because the standard size for these structures is 360 square feet and 11 feet in height.

Clinton is not alone among New Jersey towns in the severity of its restrictions. In one town of less than half a square mile in size antenna siting is nearly impossible. Only two viable cell tower sites exist in Bedminster Township, N.J., which spreads 8,000 in population across 29 square miles, because of restrictive ordinances.

“Over the last year, I have seen towns going back and revising their land use ordinances and, in most of the cases, they are making them more onerous and restrictive as to tower siting,” said Robert Weible, antenna-siting specialist, CW Solutions.

Weible, who is chair of the NJWA regulatory committee, notes the high success rate of companies litigating against municipalities over rejected cell tower applications.

“What is troubling is this mentality that municipalities have,” Weible said. “Why continue to burden themselves with more and more onerous ordinances when they are going to lose in court. That is lost tax money.”

West Windsor, N.J., for example, decided in January to ban new cell towers altogether. “Why would you do that with the increasing need for wireless communications over landline service?” Weible asked.

Jersey City, N.J., by contrast, has an administrative process whereby if the antenna is not within 200 feet of a school or a historic district, proposals are submitted in a daylong meeting for review and are then sent to a planning board for consideration.

“Larger cities in New Jersey—Jersey City and Newark—are easier municipalities to site an antenna,” Weible said. “I have been going to zoning hearings all around New Jersey and the thing you hear, time and again, is their concern about RF emissions. When you have a public forum, it lends itself to a lot of comment about emissions paranoia, but you can find that in big cities as well.”

Weible, where he can, meets with the opposition, separate from the public hearings, and provides them with as much information as he can.

“You try to find out what their concerns are,” Weible said. “You are not going to appease everyone, but if you can appease a few, it’s a win-win situation.”

Another selling point of a new tower that Weible points out to local residents is the dependence of local public safety personnel on cellular communications.

To say all politics is local in New Jersey would be an understatement. The state is made up of 566 municipalities, and a concept known as home rule allows New Jersey’s cities, towns and boroughs to have complete control over their ordinances with little input by the state.

“You could have two towns right next to each other with completely different wireless siting ordinances,” Weible said.

In order to increase state involvement in antenna siting, NJWA is lobbying for state legislation to streamline the collocation of wireless antennas on existing structures.

The “New Jersey Wireless Antenna Collocation Encouragement Act,” would guarantee that any application for an antenna collocation on an existing structure would be exempt from zoning review if the size or height of the existing structure would not be increased by more than 10 percent.