A new sky-piercing cellphone tower will rise above the Barton county horizon after the County Commission Wednesday morning approved a conditional land use permit request from Tillman Infrastructure LLC, represented by Overland Park-based Skyward Land Services to construct a 468-foot guyed communications tower west of Heizer.

“A tower of this size is as big as they get,” said Skyward President Patrick Erwin who attended the meeting. “It’s this large to cover vast amounts of rural area.”

A public hearing was held Feb. 14 to consider the request to erect the tower on a small portion of an existing 120-acre tract owned by Lindsey Ward Schlegel on NW 40 Road, west of Heizer and approximately three quarters of a mile east of the Rush County line, said Environmental Manager Judy Goreham. It will actually stand on a 16-acre plot that will include the tower, the guy lines, access road and necessary structures, she said. The entire fall radius of the tower fits within this area.

“ It was unanimously recommended by the Barton County Planning Commission that the Barton County Commission approve this request,” she said.  All landowners within 1,000 feet if the site were contacted and none were at the hearing “and in my opinion, that means there were no objections.”

She wasn’t surprised by this. She’d been working with Erwin for about a year on this project and finding a suitable location.

There is another smaller tower southwest of the site that has been round since the 1990s. But, Goreham said wireless service provider Verizon is no longer able to lease space on it.

“The company that we’re representing, Tillman Infrastructure, is actively marketing this tower to the likes of Nextech and some of the other smaller wireless internet service providers that are out there,” Erwin said. “And we do have Verizon under contract to be an anchor tenant on the structure.”

It will be set up for at least four cellular companies to install their arrays, he said. These are getting larger with technology advances, so it is designed for a minimum of four providers, each leasing 10 feet of vertical space on a first-come-first-serve basis.

Goreham said the sprawling Russell County Rural Water District 3 is in the midst of an expansion that utilizes digital water meters. “This is going to be huge for that project,” she said.

Due to the height of this tower (468 feet, including an eight-foot lightning rod), there is one condition of approval recommended, Goreham said. No building permit can be issued until the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission approvals have been received and copies submitted to the Barton County Environmental Management Office. 

Skyward is a is a wireless site development company. It operates in 19 states, from Arizona to the east coast, and from Texas to Iowa.

Tillman, based in New York, N.Y., has over 500 towers across the country.