Cell towers pay schools; some questioning risks
TAMPA (AP) – For six weeks, hundreds of Benito Middle students had nowhere to store their belongings. The 300 students not issued lockers had to lug 30-pound bookbags, Principal John Sanders said.
To the relief of concerned parents, the school installed gleaming turquoise lockers in mid-October at a cost of $40,000.
But the money didn’t come from Hillsborough schools, PTA fundraisers or some other traditional funding source. As school budgets shrink, campuses like Benito have found a financial pipeline in an unlikely and controversial place: cell phone towers.
This year, Hillsborough schools could rake in more than $230,000 from leases on towers.
But some parents say the money isn’t worth it. They say the school district is being irresponsible and gambling with students’ health without conclusive evidence that towers are safe.
“It’s literally pennies a day that each child is getting for having a cell tower there,” said Mary Meckley, who wants the district to remove the tower from her son’s school, Pride Elementary in New Tampa. “They’re hardly getting any money.”
Try telling that to cash-strapped administrators who can’t afford basics like copy machines and student textbooks.
“Having a revenue source such as this enables us to purchase things we would not be able to without it,” Sanders said.
Customer demand for cell phone service is driving the need for towers. The country’s more than 262 million wireless subscribers depend on 120,000 towers to route their calls to the appropriate destination.
In residential areas, schools are seen as prime locations for towers, said Stacy Frank, president of Collier Enterprises in Tampa. Since 2006, it has been her job to develop sites with Hillsborough principals and negotiate leases favorable to schools.
Initial leases are for 10 years, and rent rises 3 to 4 percent per year. On average, schools make more than $11,000 annually per carrier. Towers can accommodate up to five carriers.
“Most zoning codes encourage this because of the size of the property,” Frank said. “Schools offer a large tract of land in an area that otherwise has smaller tracts and residential uses. From a land use perspective, schools make sense.”
Frank said if schools don’t cash in on this growing market, another institution – a nearby church, recreational facility or hospital – will. As long as there are cell phones, she said, towers will be around us.
“What people tend not to realize is that they’re in the neighborhoods already,” she said, rattling off a list of places across Hillsborough with towers. “They’re everywhere.
“They’ll take that budget money from location A and take it to location C if they can’t get into location A,” she said. “What the schools are doing is taking advantage of an opportunity at a time when it is economically critical for them.”
Hillsborough’s school district erected its first tower at Benito four years after Congress passed a 1996 act limiting the power of local government to stop new towers.
Today, 14 Hillsborough schools lease property to cell phone carriers. Pinellas has six towers. Pasco has one, recently acquired a second and will soon have a third. Hernando did not respond to several requests for information.
Last school year, Hillsborough made more than $86,700 and Pinellas, $128,500.
In Pinellas, the money is set aside for the district’s communications system, not individual schools, said Norman Kelton, the district director of network and telecommunications.
Currently, Pasco’s portion more than $11,900 this year goes into the district’s general fund, but “it is the intent of the superintendent to share those funds back to the classroom,” planning supervisor John Letvin said.