ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, October 18, 1996 TAG: 9610180014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
BOTETOURT COUNTY'S approval this week of another communications tower on Tinker Mountain ought to send a clear signal throughout the Roanoke Valley and beyond: Enact ridgeline protection. Soon.
Lee Hartman Jr. asked the county for a permit to build a 195-foot tower on the mountain, and the Planning Commission recommended approval. The Board of Supervisors agreed on Tuesday.
This tower, which will transmit signals for such things as wireless cable TV and beepers, will go up in an area where seven other towers already stand. Far more significant than the addition of this tower is what it portends. It's not an isolated case.
Nationwide, growing use of cellular phones is driving thousands more every day to sign up for some type of wireless communication service. The result is rising demand for towers. As many as 100,000 may be installed across the country. And in mountainous areas, such as Western Virginia, the place to put them is on top of mountains.
Botetourt's new tower system, for use by R&B Communications, required a special-exception permit for installation in a Forest Conservation Use District. Most of these districts run along ridgelines - logical sites for sending out signals, but also crucial for preserving the land's unspoiled beauty.
This is not an easy issue. The wireless revolution won't be stopped - nor should it be. It holds fantastic promise. Its advance should be guided, though, so that it disturbs the landscape as little as possible, and so that localities are able to protect their most valuable viewsheds from being marred. Excellent TV reception isn't the only ingredient in quality of life.
Botetourt County already is working on revising its zoning ordinance. The new law likely will include requirements to put new antennae on existing towers when possible, and to control the height and appearance of new towers. Such minimal protections would be a good start if the rules are applied vigorously, and with a genuine commitment to preserving the scenic landscape.
Mountainous localities across the region should do no less, and they should not stop at trying to anticipate and cushion the impact from communications towers. Tract housing and condos perched on mountaintops may be more lovely than nature's crown to the eyes of developers and of the few who look out the homes' windows, but not to anyone else's.
Ridgeline protection would draw a visual line that would save our region's breath-taking vistas, a precious natural asset, for all.
Whether it creeps slowly from field to mountainside or spills out of big cities in a rush to consume great swathes of countryside - or whether it rises in the form of cellular phone towers, which are particularly large and unseemly - unguided development can lay waste to the qualities that attracted growth in the first place.
In a region whose cultural identity is entwined so closely with the glories of its landscape, localities - and the region itself - ought to be planning for growth with a care and foresight that are now seldom shown.
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