Shawano County will have to look at either altering its existing ordinance on cell phone towers or doing away with it in light of new state regulations.
Wisconsin Act 20, the state’s 2013-14 budget bill, stripped most of the local control municipalities and counties have over when and where cell towers can be built. The new regulations have made the existing county zoning ordinance unenforceable, according to Zoning Administrator Robert Jacobson.
Jacobson gave a report on the matter Wednesday to the Planning, Development and Zoning Committee. He noted that the county has had few applications recently for new towers.
The last application was approved in 2010 for a site in the town of Aniwa, with the two previous applications coming in 2007, according to Jacobson. Most of the requests the county receives currently are alterations to existing towers, such as adding and removing antennae.
Act 20 allows local ordinances on cell towers but prohibits them from declaring moratoriums on new towers, creating restrictions on where towers can be placed, establishing recurring fees and denying requests on purely aesthetic grounds, among other things.
“Our old ordinance did require in some specific zoning districts that a new tower structure required a conditional use (permit),” Jacobson said. “They’re permitted across the board now.”
The state law only applies to cell towers less than 200 feet in height. Larger structures are already subject to higher scrutiny from the Federal Aviation Administration, Jacobson said.
Supervisor Marlin Noffke said the cell tower provision in Act 20 is part of a trend that the county and municipalities had better get used to.
“We’ve have so many cases where we’ve had a bunch of control freaks who wanted to stop everything from happening, and as a result, you have a hodgepodge of crazy patchwork quilts throughout the state,” Noffke said. “Eventually, someone from the state says, ‘This isn’t working. We’ve got to come in and be uniform.’ ”
Noffke suggested that the state should have taken it a step further and established uniformed regulations for other zoning issues, although he did not elaborate which ones.
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