Good afternoon.

This is Tuesday, December seventeenth, twenty twenty-four, four PM.

We're here for a special meeting.

Uh we're gonna discuss the cell tower service survey and our twenty twenty-five legislative priorities.

So you get a roll call, please.

Okay, thank you.

Good afternoon.

Uh item number one is a uh follow-up from a previous workshop talking about cell tower service.

Council member Lutman had asked if we would uh talk about that during a recent council workshop.

Uh we did talk about that.

We talked about some of the sporadic service primarily on the parkway, but then it expanded the conversation to what about other areas of the community that might be having cell service issues.

So uh Travis Pruitt, uh assistant city manager is gonna come up and walk you through the survey that was recently administered in our community and talk about the results.

I think you'll be a little surprised by what you uh hear from Travis, and then we'll take questions and figure out the next steps forward.

Travis.

Thank you, Toby.

Uh, good evening, uh mayor and council members.

As Toby mentioned, uh, we wanted to get a sense of uh what people's uh opinions were in relation to cell towers, particularly so around the park way.

So we put out our normal survey, our normal survey tool that we put out to citizens.

Uh piece by piece, and I believe each one of you have a copy.

And also there should be a um we should see it on the uh screen here in just a moment once the um TV three crew gets it up there.

Thank you, appreciate that.

And then also for members of the public, I believe there's a couple copies in the back if you want to grab one of those.

Um and through that time period, three hundred and ninety-three um people uh responded to the survey with the following comments.

So I'll give you a summary.

We'll go through one by one.

So the first uh summary area was how how aware are you of the presence of cell towers in your area?

Um so we wanted to just get a sense of as you know how aware are people of these towers, what are they seeing?

Do they see them around?

So overall, as you can see from the results there, um, I mean, 67% are very aware of it, actually, total of 78% total are aware of it.

So good, I mean, most people see them around, they know they're out there, so they have a good sense of that.

And we're asking this question as it's kind of a lead up to the the other questions that follow, so we can get a sense of okay, who who are the people that are answering actually, or um how how much knowledge about cell towers do they have um that are responding to these questions.

So the next graph you see, we asked the question how often do you rely on mobile slash cell service at your home?

So we wanted to get a sense of you know who are using these at their home, what's the impact for people at home?

And as you can see from the results there, um, overall, about 98% rely on cell at home.

I mean, it's broken up between frequently and always, but really 98%.

Uh so the majority of people are relying on this at home, and we wanted to ask that question.

So you get a sense of it, it really is uh has an impact on people.

Um, you know, if they have cells uh cell service when they're at home.

So next question, if you go to the third uh third graph, we posed the question how how often do you rely on mobile slash cell service while driving or riding in a car?

And this was critical because what some of the initial feedback that we got was of course the cell service people thought it wasn't great around the parkway.

So we were really, and that's really a drivable area.

So we wanted to get a sense of what we were looking at in that uh regard.

So again, same thing if you're thinking about okay, how many people actually rely on this?

It's about 95% between always frequents frequently and occasionally.

So large majority of people are actually relying on the cell service while they're in their car, as as you might expect.

Um next next graph there, thank you.

Um next question was do you believe the installation of new cell towers would improve the mobile network coverage in your neighborhood?

And this is really one of the key questions here.

This is really what you want to know.

So, as you can imagine, uh, or maybe it's a surprise, um, nine uh about 91% of the people said yes.

They think that yes, cell towers would improve their service.

To me, if a person says that, they're probably open and looking to get uh additional cell towers in their area, but we'll hash that out some more in uh some of the other questions.

But yeah, you got about 90, 91% of people think yes.

Um next graph.

How do you feel about having a cell tower near your home?

And of course, this is the question here, because you know, you got a lot of people, yeah, I'd like to get better service, but I don't want my house to be impacted.

So key question, um, interesting results.

So if you look at it, um, of course, at the um we looked at in terms of who's comfortable and and who's not comfortable with this.

So at four uh you have about 35% of people are very comfortable, and then 13.75% are somewhat comfortable.

So if you add those two together, you got about 48% are saying pretty much, yeah, we're comfortable and varying levels of comfort.