Cell Tower Hearing October 28

The Planning Commission will hold a public hearing on proposed new rules to regulate where cellular phone towers can go and what they can look like in Hood River County. The hearing is on October 28 at  5:30 in the Board of Commissioners Meeting Room, 601 State Street.

Here is a draft of the proposed code. The code puts the onus on the applicant to prove that new facilities are needed and makes it easy to locate facilities in locations with minimal impact (like co-locating additional arrays on an existing tower) but much, much harder to locate incompatible towers near residential areas.

Until now, the county has not had specific code for towers, which has meant that towers have been proposed for inappropriate residential areas forcing neighbors to mobilize in expensive and emotional opposition efforts.

The proposed code is the end result of a year-long citizen driven effort organized by HRVRC. Last year, HRVRC, together with a number of interested citizens, approached the Board of Commissioners about forming a Citizen Advisory Committee to help craft rules governing cell towers. We proposed that a citizen-initiated group could ease the burden on staff by doing much of the foundation work of crafting a cell tower ordinance for our county. The Commissioners gave us the green light to form a committee and start work.

Planning Commissioners Peter Frothingham and John Brennan joined the Citizen Advisory Committee and we worked with Planning Department Director John Roberts and Planner Eric Walker to develop the rules that will be reviewed tonight. After the Planning Commission reviews the proposed code, it will go to the Board of Commissioners for a hearing. The Commissioners hope to have new code in place by the end of the year.

Many thanks to the Advisory Committee members for their hard work and thoughtful contributions: Steffen Lunding, Cecelia Goodnight, Melanie Finstad, Melanie Thompson, Jeff Hunter, Polly Wood and Heather Staten as well as Commissioners Frothingham and Brennan and County staff.