Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
County: Radio tower could get new spot
A huge radio tower designed to improve the county’s spotty 911 system may not be coming to West Lake Park after all.
Hollywood scored a small but key victory Tuesday in its battle to keep the 32-story metal tower out of the park, a pretty spot popular with kayakers, cyclists and young families.
Broward commissioners agreed 8-1 to consider an alternate spot offered up by the city: the rooftop of the newly built Circ apartment tower downtown.
But should that plan not work out, county commissioners made it clear they’ll take the fight to court unless Hollywood comes around.
“If there’s going to be a long delay [for an engineering study], I want us to move ahead,” County Commissioner Steve Geller said. “We have to get this online quickly.”
Two deadly massacres — the Parkland school shooting in February 2018 and the Fort Lauderdale airport shooting in January 2017 — exposed glaring problems with the county’s emergency communications system.
Both tragedies required a massive police response, but the radio system couldn’t handle the swarm of officers trying to use their radios at the same time. Unable to talk to dispatchers or one other, many were forced to use hand signals to communicate.
The tower, one of seven going up
around Broward, is needed to upgrade the county’s patchy 911 communications system, county officials say.
They want all seven towers up and running by December.
County Commissioner Barbara Sharief had harsh words for Hollywood on Tuesday.
“I really don’t think those parents who lost their kids give a damn about where we put this tower,” she said. “I’m not worried about grass and trees right now. I don’t need to sit here for two hours. Let’s make a decision to get this done.”
County Commissioner Michael Udine, whose district includes Parkland, cast the lone vote against researching whether the radio equipment would fit on the roof of a high rise in downtown Hollywood.
Udine argued the county can’t afford to delay.
He mentioned a recent tiff with Tamarac over a tower going up next to City Hall.
“They didn’t want it either, but it was a necessity for public safety,” Udine said.
Tamarac commissioners tried to block the tower but eventually relented after sharp criticism from the state public safety commission set up to review the Parkland shooting.
Hollywood officials pointed out that the county plans to place radio equipment on the top of a high-rise tower in Pompano Beach and already has two atop towers in Fort Lauderdale.
Why not Hollywood?
Tracy Jackson, who oversees Broward’s 911 system, says the county doesn’t own land in those cities. But it does own West Lake Park.
Hollywood Mayor Josh Levy argued it would save time and money to put the equipment on top of the Circ building, just a mile from the park.
Building the tower will cost more than $1 million and take up to four months, county officials have said.
When the county first started scouting for locations in Hollywood two years ago, the apartment tower had not yet been built.
“But here we are in 2019 and the building has since been completed,” Levy said.
An engineer for the building owner has already said the Circ’s rooftop can support the grouping of six antennas, two satellite dishes and other equipment that weighs more than 17,000 pounds.
Hollywood Commissioner Caryl Shuham told county commissioners the downtown site makes sense.
“We believe [it] can be completed faster, better, more safely and more cheaply,” she said.
Building the tower in West Lake Park faces another snag, county commissioners learned Tuesday.
The parkland is protected by restrictive covenants that may not allow a giant radio tower, said County Commissioner Beam Furr, whose district includes Hollywood.
Waiving those restrictions would require a “yes” vote from eight of the nine commissioners, County Attorney Drew Meyers said.
“West Lake Park is worth trying to preserve,” Furr said. “We should try to protect it.”