By John Francis
Proposed Cell Tower Would Still Leave Many Cottages in Dead Zone, Say Councillors
At MNBP’s most recent Council Meeting, on May 13, Council voted by a 3-2 margin not to concur with a cell phone tower proposed for 75 Lindsay Road 40.
The issue was extremely contentious despite the fact that all five council members agree that improving cell service is a major priority.
Councillor Smokey Golden stated that the proposed tower would not provide the improvements people were expecting. Councillor Todd Dowd stated that there were better locations for the tower in the Gillies Lake area and that there are landowners there who would be willing to host a tower on their properties.
In a subsequent conversation, Deputy Mayor Rod Anderson told me that he opposed the Lindsay Road 40 location because it would still leave a lot of cottages in Dyers Bay and Cape Chin in the shadow of the escarpment. He said that a Gillies Lake location would provide much better service.
So I looked it up on Bruce County Maps. Wow.
They’re right. It would make a huge difference. Instead of shooting signal over the heads of all the cottagers (as in the illustration), a tower at Gillies Lake would offer line-of-sight signal to nearly everybody along the shore from Cabot Head to Cape Chin.
You can certainly see why three councillors thought the process needed to start over.
Bruce County Maps is a wonderful tool/toy. It’s free. You can find it at
brucecounty.on.ca/maps
There’s an incredible amount of information baked into the map system so it tends to be slow and complicated. But it’s worth it!
The layers button in the lower left opens a side panel showing all the information layers that are available. If you turn on “Elevation”, it will show you where all the cliffs are. Zoom out a bit and you can see how a Gillies Lake tower would send signal along the cliffs and serve nearly everybody.
While you’re there, expand the Base Maps tab to see the four different sets of aerial photos you can access — dating back to 2006.
