The town of Grande Prairie, in the Canadian province of Alberta, tasked their City Council with reviewing a request to build a cell tower at a downtown site between the Avondale and Royal Oaks neighborhoods. City Furniture currently occupies the site, which has residential dwellings nearby. Upon considering the location and studying up on town bylaws, the Council declined to recommend the cell tower project, reports My Grande Prairie Now.
“Not all councilors are comfortable with putting extra cell towers close to schools or sporting fields,” said Deputy Mayor Gladys Blackmore. “It seems that we don’t have enough knowledge to comfortably make that determination.”
To shore up their general discomfort with the cell tower proposal, city administration pointed to the cell tower’s possible infringement on the city-wide Land Use Bylaw as a reason not to support it. The Land Use Bylaw prohibits cell towers from being built near residences that are located within six times the height of the proposed cell tower.
Councillor Dylan Bressey added that a tall cell tower would also compromise Grande Prairie’s “High Visibility Corridor” edicts. “The high visibility corridor is on the major thoroughfares of our city that get lots of traffic, especially out-of-town traffic,” he remarked. “We’ve got higher aesthetic standards there than everywhere else in the city, just to make sure that we’re giving a really good first impression to the people that are visiting.”
“I think there are really two separate issues,” confirmed Blackmore. “It falls too close to residences based on our policies and bylaws, [and] it’s within six times the height of the tower, and so it is clearly not meeting our own requirements, and our own bylaws.”
Armed with the Land Use Bylaw and High Visibility Corridor defenses, the City Council declined to issue their support for the cell tower according to My Grande Prairie Now. Whether or not plans for the proposed cell tower move ahead will fall to the discretion of Canada’s Innovation, Science, and Economic Development department.
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