“There ought to be some way we can stop this thing. They’ve got three footers in that thing and that’s going to be over 200 feet tall,” he said. “The lady next door, it’s almost in her front yard and she just lost her husband, and she is thinking about selling her house. And they’re gonna have that big tower in her front yard.”
Karen Oller, who would live next door to the tower, said she began trying to fight the structure over a year ago because she had always wanted to build a handicapped accessible house on the lot she owns next to Jeff Copeland, who is leasing the front part of the property to Verizon for the tower.
“I talked to the owner of the property whom I have known since he wore diapers and came to my house to play…,” she said. “It’s a situation where he’s doing it because he needs the money, that’s the bottom line.”
She said she considered hiring an attorney, but the township trustees assured her there is nothing that can prevent the tower. She said she was ready to start building her second home on the five acres she owns between her current house and Copeland’s house, but has now scratched that idea.
“Of course I’m not going ahead with it because I realized that this tower is taking down the value of the property,” she said. “So it would be a bad investment to build a new house there.”
Copeland said this is a private matter that he won’t discuss, but not everyone is mad at him. In fact, some people “were glad about it,” he said.
“My neighbor behind me said he was glad about it because he can have cell phone service now,” Copeland said. “I don’t want people to be upset about it, that was not my intention in doing it to upset people, honestly.”
Butler County Development Director David Fehr said under state law, cell towers are considered public utilities and thus are exempt from zoning laws. Earlier this year, Liberty Twp., after two years worth of work, was able to put some restrictions in place to slow the fast pace of cell tower construction and buffer the ill effects of the structures.
Fehr said Morgan Twp. wouldn’t have the same opportunity.
“There is a small piece in the legislation that an area zoned for residential use, you can at least make them come for a zoning review,” he said. “But Morgan Twp., everything out there is zoned for agricultural use. We’ve even tried to say even though it’s zoned for agriculture, you can build residential homes but that’s not good enough; it would have to be zoned residential. And most people don’t want their property zoned residential because that opens up a whole other can of worms of allowing more dense development.”
In Liberty Twp., County Engineer Greg Wilkens said the protections the trustees enacted don’t apply because it is in the right-of-way and not subject to zoning.
The residents in the Wynds of Liberty subdivision have been burning up the Internet with emails trying to marshal support from elected officials and others who they hope can help them keep the 36-foot cell towers out of their front easements. Mike Tsirelis and his neighbor across the street, Mike Wieland, launched a campaign against the towers a couple weeks ago after Tsirelis found contractors spray painting his easement.
Tsirelis camped out on that spot on Monday, refusing to let contractors dig up his yard, until they moved to the other location four blocks away. Cincinnati Bell plans to build the towers for Verizon, but they backed off a bit on Tuesday, saying they would "re-evaluate" but not cancel their plans.
Tsirelis isn’t giving up the fight. He said he talked to the construction manager Tuesday who was at a Snowbird Drive home in the subdivision.
“He was pretty clear that they do intend to move forward with these projects. They are just trying to take a step back and communicate with the homeowners like they should’ve done in the first place before proceeding. My guess is this will happen sometime in January. They are highly motivated to get these in the ground,” he wrote in an email.
“On a positive note, that does give us time to continue to reach out to those elected officials that can make a difference, if they choose to listen to the people that vote them into office,” he said.
State Sen. Bill Coley, R-Liberty Twp. could not be reached for comment. State Rep. Margy Condit, also a Liberty Twp. Republican, said she has started discussions on what the state legislature might be able to do to help, but since a federal court in Cincinnati in the 1990s declared cell towers public utilities, she isn’t sure what can be done.
“We’re trying to find the right bill or the right language that will actually be Constitutional,” she said. “We’ve been talking to lots of people about it. I wish there were an easy fix.”
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