City of Hoover approves new 250-foot-tall cell tower in Blackridge community
The Hoover Board of Zoning Adjustment tonight approved a new 250-foot cell tower in the Blackridge community to be built south of Trace Crossings.
The cell tower will be just south of the Lake Wilborn community, which is also under construction at the end of Stadium Trace Parkway, said Richard Johnson, a representative for Signature Homes.
The tower is needed to provide better cell phone coverage to the 500 houses to be built in Lake Wilborn and the 650 houses that Signature plans to build on its portion of Blackridge, Johnson said.
Plus, it should help provide better cell service for Hoover Metropolitan Stadium and the new $80 million sports complex the city is building next to the stadium, he said.
Bob House, a planning consultant for the city of Hoover, said the cell tower should serve the area within a 3-mile radius.
No one spoke against the cell tower at tonight’s public hearing, but no one yet lives in the immediate vicinity of where the tower will be.
House said that when Hoover first started reviewing cell tower applications, people pitched a fit about them. But these days, unless the cell tower is very close to their house, people don’t care because they want better cellular service, House said.
Dan Mikos, chairman of the Board of Zoning Adjustment, said people will have a chance to know before they buy lots in Lake Wilborn or Blackridge that a cell tower is there.
Nevertheless, members of the board sought assurances from Signature Homes that as many trees would be left around the base of the tower as possible to help hide it. Johnson said it’s in the developer’s best interest to make the tower as unobtrusive as possible so they can sell the lots.
“We’re not going to do anything to harm ourselves,” he said.
But in today’s world, people see good cellular service as an amenity and to develop 1,150 homes without adequate cell service would be foolish, he said.
The tower will be on 110-by-110-foot lot just south of the first set of railroad tracks people will see as they head southwest on Stadium Trace Parkway, Johnson said. It will be more than 250 feet away so that if the tower were to fall, it should not land on houses, Johnson said.
House said this is a taller tower than most in Hoover. Most of the towers in Hoover are 200 feet tall or less, but the taller the tower, the fewer towers are needed in a given area, he said.
There already are complaints of poor cell service at Hoover Metropolitan Stadium, Hoover High School and Bumpus Middle School, so this should help that situation, board members said.
The Southeastern Conference told Hoover officials, when Hoover was trying to win an extension on its contract for the SEC Baseball Tournament, that the city needed to provide better cellular service at the stadium, House said.
However, a single cell tower such as this one is designed to handle only 20,000 cellular devices at a time, so there’s still a chance that signal booster devices will need to be brought in to the Hoover Met or the new sports complex during peak usage events, House said.
This tower likely will serve multiple cell phone companies, he said. The company expected to own the tower is called Southern Towers. The Federal Aviation Administration has given preliminary approval for the tower, Johnson said.