- November 16, 2024
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Spotty cell signal coverage along Palm Coast Parkway between U.S.1 and Interstate 95 may soon improve.
The Palm Coast City Council at a Tuesday, July 21 meeting unanimously approved an ordinance eliminating a 50-foot height cap for cell towers along the Palm Coast Parkway corridor to let providers build new towers.
“As we become a paperless society … we become dependant on these services as a business community and residents alike,” Palm Coast planner Constance Bentley said in a presentation ay the meeting.
She showed color-coded diagrams illustrating signal strength in the area: Red and yellow blotches overlaid on a map of Palm Coast illustrated cell tower locations and strong signal strength on U.S. 1 and Palm Coast Parkway near Old Kings Road, but most of Palm Coast Parkway showed up in greens and blues, indicating low cell signal strength.
If a new tower is added along Palm Coast Parkway, City Manager Jim Landon said, “Right in the middle of the blue will be a big red blotch,” he said. “Most of the blue that’s in that box will go away. It will turn into red, green and yellow.”
Increases in data usage actually limit current towers’ reach, he said.
“It’s not just how far away from the tower you are, it also has to do with how much business or service you have going through those antennas,” Landon said. “As we get more and more data being pushed through them, they’re coverage area actually shrinks. So lots of times you’ll see between 5 and 6 in the evening, as everybody’s going home and calling and saying ‘pick up the milk,’ a lot of places become dead that aren’t dead otherwise.”
If a provider adds a tower in the area, it would have to be at least 150 feet from the road and have at least a 10-foot setback.
City resident Lewis McCarthy, speaking in the meeting’s public comment period, asked the council what a new tower would look like. “I say that because sometimes they are just gross,” he said. “Please, please, disguise it in some way or another.”
In the past, Mayor Jon Netts said, the city has disguised cell towers as flagpoles. Other places have disguised them as trees. But, Netts said, “they’re really strange looking. Maybe if they were in the Redwood natural forest they might blend in.”
Landon said that future poles would be monopoles, like the flagpoles.
Netts said increased dependence on cell phones make reliable coverage ever more important.
“To me there’s an issue of public safety,” he said. “As more and more individuals are getting rid of their hardwired landline phones, and depending solely on wireless, the last thing you want in the case of an emergency is not to be able to communicate.”
