I am contemplating buying a 5-acre horse property and want to put up a tower with several yagis and vertical antennas on stand-offs, up to 1.2 GH so I need both height and short feedline.
Surrounding the place, there is an empty lot behind it, with power lines lower down that I'd like to be above as much as possible. There a horse exercise area, accessed through my right of way with a couple of ugly trailers I will have to plant screening for my own benefit, a house on either side, one of which is quite low with trees and a fallen in barn blocking the view, and the other side has massive screening from large trees. There is a large house across the street and several other homes across the street. Nearly the entire frontage is lined with moderate scrubby type trees that I wanted to remove but will probably leave or plant something bigger and or fill in any gaps. Most homes have trees 50' high between my preferred tower location and them. Local zoning requires the height to me no more than 20' above the average height of the surrounding trees (a number open to interpretation) for the tower height and it says nothing about masts on top of that. A 70' tilt over tower would be close to their requirements. Still the top 20 ' or more would be visible.
So you can see this is not some tract home development with homes on top of each other.
The town has excessive requirements for permitting this, including proposing two or more locations, a $2000 fee, posting a $10,000 bond for an independent consultant to review this, with a possible partial refund, height limitations, an overly complex application process including renderings, photo simulations, sightline views, possibly flying a balloon for two weeks at the height of the proposed tower, elevation drawings from all adjoining properties and numerous other limitations. They have so many regulations and such a high cost, it makes this unaffordable. I feel like just putting up what I want to deal with them in court later if necessary. I would guess that most of my neighbors would not care what I did. Possibly one or two houses 250' away and across the street might find in mildly objectionable. If I had a 200' tower with lights on it, everyone would freak out, but I think a 70' tower would be ok.
So given the large size of the lot, and the distances, and the fair amount of screening, I think I'm good. The danger might be if I wanted to apply for a permit later to rebuild the fallen down barn, they could hassle me. Additionally, they could jack up my real estate tax and punish me that way. As a new guy in town, I would expect long time resident would have a lot of sway while I would have little but the CFR's which are not clearly defined from what I can read.
What are my rights? I would think they could not stop me in this situation. Reading the CFRs it would seem that I must follow the town zoning proceedure, which by being both time consuming and overly costly violated Federal Regulation. My inclination is to simply put it up, and take photos from every other property and have them ready in case I get challenged on it. I'm not payiing a $2000 fee. Nor am I paying $10,000 for an independent consultant.