UPDATED Aug. 23, 2023 | Charleston’s new eyesore — a 113-foot 5G wireless communications tower that looks like three rolls of toilet paper atop a pole — slithered into existence without anyone being able to do much about it, thanks to the Federal Communications Commission.
At the end of June, the agency received notice that an older tower — a tall, skinny, white monopole on Line Street that seemed innocuous next to a blaring billboard — was to be modified by a new Florida owner. A new brick wall went up around it and poof! The “Toilet Roll Pole” (TRP) came into existence.
“I think it’s really ugly,” said George Baerreis, who works at the Recovery Room on King Street. “I hate it every time that I drive in.”
The city of Charleston says it can’t do anything about the tower, which seems to smack motorists as they turn along Septima P. Clark Parkway toward Mount Pleasant.
“Under federal and state regulations, the city is strictly prohibited from imposing design standards on so-called ‘transmission towers’ such as this one,” said Charleston city spokesman Jack O’Toole. “Mayor [John] Tecklenburg is reaching out directly to our federal and state representatives to see what can be done to allow for more local and citizen input before these towers are built.”
According to section 1455 of Title 47 of U.S. Code, “a state or local government may not deny, and shall approve, any eligible facilities request for a modification of an existing wireless tower or base station that does not substantially change the physical dimensions of such tower or base station.”
Translated, the FCC regulation from 2016 makes it nearly impossible for a municipality to interfere with plans to modify an existing tower, even in a historic city like Charleston. Thanks to the regulation, modifications related to wireless communications services trump local or environmental concerns.
“It’s a way for the telecom companies to get around dealing with the cities,” said Angelina Panettieri, a legislative director with the National League of Cities. “The regulation has been rewritten by the FCC to allow a lot of changes and expansions under the guise of modifications and upgrades.”
She said there were good ways for companies to upgrade towers by engaging the community in the process.
“If they don’t engage with the community or camouflage the site, that’s when people in the community get upset.”
Some towers are cleverly camouflaged as trees or flagpoles. Others are masked by having them located in out-of-the-way places, such as the four-roll tower in Mount Pleasant along the marsh off Ben Sawyer Road.
“I don’t think any city is going to say ‘we don’t want better service,’” Panettieri said. “They just want the providers to work with them a little bit.”
It’s just plain ugly
Sarah Griffith, who manages heavy metal bar Sugey’s under the tower, said patrons have been asking about the TRP since it was first installed recently. But she never knows what to tell them.
“It looks like some sort of communications tower, but who it’s for, who it’s communicating to…who knows?” she said, laughing softly. Griffith, like some of Sugey’s patrons, views TRP as an object of genuine curiosity. She says she’s “not bothered by it,” but “it’s definitely bizarre.”
Baerreis said when he first saw TRP, he thought it was an unfinished billboard pending the attachment of an actual billboard.
“That [a new billboard] would probably be worse, honestly,” he admitted. “I’ve lived here since 1991, so I remember Charleston before everything was a hotel — before you could build above the steeples,” he said.
Now for many, the Toilet Roll Pole is just another ugly thing crowding the Charleston horizon.
“The skyline was something special, and it’s not anymore,” he said.
WHAT TO DO: Contact your member of Congress and complain. Panettieri said a bill under consideration, the American Broadband Deployment Act of 2023 (HR 3557) would turn the FCC regulation on tower modifications into law, which would make it harder to overturn. She said the National League of Cities and other organizations have been lobbying Congress to reject HR 3557.
Lily Levin and Andy Brack contributed to this story.
An earlier version of this story was posted Aug. 18.
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