This is a local politics story, but I suspect it's being played out in communities all over. If so, I'd like to know other people's take on it.
The short version: T-Mobile wants to install a cell tower in a residential community. The residents don't want them to. T-Mobile's reasons don't seem to me to add up, and they are fighting way too hard. What are they hiding?
Here's the longer version of the story. I live in Delaware County, PA, in the southwestern suburbs of Philly. It begins a couple of years back when I noticed a sign on someone's property in the neighboring borough of Swarthmore, protesting the planned development of this cell tower. I didn't pay much attention to it, but a more activist friend of mine has followed it pretty closely and told me when eventually T-Mobile was challenged in court and lost. End of the story.
Except it wasn't. Next they're in our borough, and we are informed that they're planning to pay the Fire Company to install the tower on the roof of the firehouse. The tower is 100 feet tall. There are a couple of very vocal hearings but it looks like the Borough Council is leaning toward granting T-Mobile's request. My friend goes to an attorney who looks into it, observes that the Council is not following their own procedures and that there is a conflict of interest (sorry, I don't remember details; again I was getting this all second hand) and lo and behold suddenly the request is withdrawn. End of story.
Except it wasn't. A few months ago, we get the word that a private citizen (owners of a tiny parcel of commercial property in this otherwise residential zone) is applying for a zoning variance to allow the tower to be installed in their parking lot.
This time I go to the zoning hearing, and hear T-Mobile's testimony. Their story, as it has been from the beginning, is that we are in a "coverage gap". They swear in an "expert witness" (a young BS with 5 years of experience) who duly shows their coverage maps, green all around except for a scary white area which we are smack in the middle of. There was a lot of other mind-numbing testimony, much of it to the effect that T-Mobile was duly licensed to install cell towers, that duly qualified people would be doing the installation, and that the reason they needed a variance was because there was no way to comply with the zoning regulations (my heart bleeds). Needless to say, sympathies from residents were not with T-Mobile. What the zoning board is thinking I can't say. They didn't rule immediately and remained deadpan throughout.
They never did define "coverage gap", but every T-Mobile customer anybody knows in this area has never experienced anything like a service problem. So filling a "gap" isn't the real reason. My rough guess is that they've spent at least $100K fighting this. Why are they really fighting so hard and so long?