Frankenpine?

I've just come from a special joint-session of the city's three land use boards, where board members heard a proposal for a cell tower to be placed along Route 50, heading toward Ballston Spa. The board members are greatly concerned about what a cell tower might look like in such a locations, and rightly so.

To date, SBA, a communication property development company, has done a good job disguising its cell towers, particularly in the barn and silo over on Crescent Ave., which I had ridden by on my bike dozens of times, and not noticed that it wasn't a barn until it was pointed out to me earlier this week.

But the trouble with the current proposal is that the necessary tower needs to be 125 feet tall. That's one large silo. Instead, SBA is proposing a "stealth pine." The problem that I see is that no matter how you dress the tower up, it will still stick out like a sore thumb to anyone paying attention, if for no other reason than that it's going to double the height of the surrounding trees.

But that's not to say we shouldn't have the tower, and it's not to say we shouldn't try to disguise it. I'm as attached to my phone as the next guy, probably more so, since I don't have a home phone, and I fully understand that the infrastructure to support those phones is essential. But we can't have both a pretty landscape and uniform cell coverage.

So, that leaves us striving to find some middle ground, and it seems the this stealth pine could be the ticket. But we'll see.