Chris Gilligan walks along a privately maintained road near the site proposed for a new Verizon Wireless communications tower near Gilligan’s family’s property in Rock Spring, Ga., on Thursday.Will a patriotic disguise make a proposed cellphone tower palatable for residents of Lookout Mountain, Tenn.?
“It’s a flagpole and the antennas are hidden inside,” Town Consultant Dwight Montague said. “It’d be a real tall flagpole with a big American flag on top.”
That’s the design that Wireless Properties, a Chattanooga-based company that owns about 270 cellphone towers, is expected to unveil at a special May 1 town commission meeting at 6 p.m. at Lookout Mountain Elementary School. It’s vying with AT&T, which leans toward installing a cellphone tower shaped like a tree near the town hall.
A new tower would improve cellphone service on Lookout Mountain, Montague said, and the town government stands to earn around $1,500 a month, initially, if it allows a company to build a tower on town-owned property. That income would increase as additional companies rented space on the flagpole or tree-shaped tower.
“They call cell towers vertical real estate,” Montague said. “You’re renting space on a pole.”