Water District Studies Tower Proposal

Water managers are exploring a proposal to raise a 1,850-foot tower - taller than Chicago's famed Sears Tower - between the Everglades and the western fringe of development in Palm Beach County.

By renting antenna space to broadcasters, the South Florida Water Management District figures it might reap $400,000 to $500,000 a year to help carry out a mission that includes cobbling together money to pay staggering Everglades restoration bills.

The tower, southwest of the intersection of U.S. 441 and Lantana Road, could also help improve the bottom line of Boynton Beach-based public television and radio station WXEL, which is pushing the idea in hopes of landing a rent-free antenna perch, said Jerry Carr, station president.

But at that height it could become the second-largest structure in Florida, and a prolific bird killer climbing into a key migration flyway, ornithologists say.

"It's going to slaughter birds," said Bill Evans, a night migration consultant to the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, in Ithaca, N.Y.

"A tower of that size, based on long-term studies, will kill 2,000 to 3,000 birds a year" or more, he said.

The Florida Audubon Society is worried too about the bird-strike threat. The group also objects to the "visual eyesore" such a tower would present next door top a panorama of protected wet wilderness, the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge, Florida Audubon representative Charles Lee said.

The tower, with six guy wires, would go up about a mile from the refuge's east levee on 200 to 235 acres of "disturbed, low-quality wetlands" heavily woven with exotic vegetation, water district spokeswoman Ann Overton said.

The parcel is part of a 1,603-acre chunk of water district-owned property called the Strazzulla Tract that water managers purchased in 1988, she said.

The tower could rank as the second-largest structure in Florida after a 1,909 foot TV tower in Florida's Panhandle, according to a 1998 Federal Aviation Administration database on aviation "obstacles."

The second-tallest tower in the state, the FAA record says, stands 1,841 feet in Princeton. 

Water district staff are merely exploring the tower idea and would weigh environmental impacts before making a decision, Overton said: "We're in a fact-finding mode."

By Neil Santaniello
September 28, 1999.