MACC works on Warden tower
WARDEN — The Multi Agency Communications Center (MACC) may be moving closer to adding a radio tower in Warden.
The new site is part of a plan to build new towers to increase the reliability of emergency radio service in Grant County. Plans included five new sites and rebuilding the other five sites.
The project is in its fourth year after a 0.1 percent sales tax increase was approved in November 2005.
The majority of the new towers have been built or are in the process of being construction, but the project administrators are having problems finding a spot to build the Moses Lake tower. They want to replace the antenna presently on the Nelson Road water tower with a free standing tower.
The MACC board of directors agreed to abandon plans to find a three-acre plot of land in May, in favor of a plot of land owned by Grant County Fire District 5 on the corner of Baseline Road and Potato Hill Road.
When MACC started inquiring about the property, it discovered the land didn’t have a zoning designation, Radio Communications Manager Dean Hane said in a December MACC board meeting. The county made an administrative decision to designate the land rural residential.
Damien Hooper, Grant County’s planning manager, explained in an interview after the meeting, most of the space around the area is used for residential purposes.
“The zoning would have to be compatible,” he said. “The properties around there are residential in nature, except for the southwest corner, which is ag … Everything else around that is not zoned agriculture.”
Restrictions in height requirements for the tower and the distance it needed to be from property lines, prompted planners to start looking for another location, Warden City Administrator Mike Thompson told the city council during the last meeting. The center is presently looking at locations near Wheeler Road, where the signal would not cover Warden.
“So they wanted to know if they could put an antenna down here,” he said.
MACC is considering a location on Beck Way to construct the Warden tower, Thompson said.
“They’re still calculating (the height), but we’re thinking probably 100 feet,” he said “It’s going to be a self-standing antenna.”
Police Chief Rick Martin supported adding the antenna in Warden, saying the previous plans seems to exclude the city.
“The bottom line is every municipality that has a police department has a MACC antenna approximate to the city except for Warden,” he said. “When this final plan came out Warden was still off of there, so I told Mary Allen and Dean Hane that I was going to object to it because of that reason.”
The chief explained the officers’ portable radios have trouble reaching the proposed locations of the Moses Lake antenna.
“I’m pretty excited that they’re building a tower here, because it will be done right as far as I can see,” he said.
Mayor Roldan Capetillo said he was concerned about the location becoming crowded with towers, but would prefer to have all the towers together. A Verizon Wireless tower is also planned for the area.
“So now we’ve got the antennas on top of the water tower, plus Verizon, now we’re going to have MACC. I’m all in favor of MACC, if anything, but we already signed with Verizon,” he said. “I know you need that, but I just don’t want it to become a cluster of antennas up there.”
Thompson said the plan was still preliminary because MACC hasn’t finalized a deal on the property on Wheeler Road.