Cell Tower Planned to Improve Coverage for Developments Along U.S. 1 and B Section in Northwest Palm Coast

Diamond Towers, the company working with Palm Coast government since 2017 to add cell towers around the city, is proposing to build a 150-foot monopole tower at 100 Park Square in a currently vacant city-owned field near the west end of Matanzas Woods Parkway. The proposal is being driven by AT&T, which wants to improve its coverage in that area.




It is Diamond Towers’s first proposal since a plan to raise a tower on Club House Drive was thwarted after it was proposed in the fall of 2022 even though, paradoxically, residents continue to complain of poor coverage: half of Palm Coast still has unreliable cell coverage according to a Diamond analysis completed last fall.

“This is not changed much from the presentation that was done in the last year,” Tom Waniewski, in charge of Diamond’s site acquisition, told the Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday. Though the company works with public and private concerns to add coverage, “there’s been very few new antennas located on existing towers, nor new towers approved within the Palm Coast area and within Flagler County.”

The tower proposal at the northwest of the city is not expected to draw opposition. It would improve coverage for new developments going up along U.S. 1 in the Palm Coast Park area all the way to the Flagler-St. Johns County line as well as improved coverage for the B and L-Sections toward I-95.

Diamond–previously known as Diamond Communications–would follow a somewhat different arrangement than it’s had with the city for previous towers (it has built about five so far). Diamond would pay all construction costs, as was the case previously. It would pay the city a one-time fee of $50,000, double the fee it paid in the past. The city previously took a 40 percent share of revenue from carrier leases on the tower, with each tower providing space for up to four carriers. In this case, the city would take either 40 percent pr $1,000 a month from the first carrier (whichever is greater), then 50 percent of revenue from each additional carrier.




“We tend to try to place our towers into their different planned communities before they’re built,” Tom Waniewski, in charge of Diamond’s site acquisition, told the Palm Coast City Council on Tuesday. “We try to integrate them in. It’s a lot easier to work with them and design it into the PUD [planned unit development], rather than come in later and try to cram it in somewhere that doesn’t fit.” (Waniewski was trying to put the obvious in gentler terms: it’s easier to put up a tower in or near a planned subdivision before people start moving in than after, when those residents are likelier to raise a nimby stink.)

Diamond had suggested to AT&T to site the tower further south, on city land at its water treatment plant. “Unfortunately, AT&T felt that was too far away,” Waniewski said. The proposed site is a city-owned pad that won’t interfere with future developments. It’s used as part of the city’s sewer infrastructure. “Soon as we start construction, we cut the city a check for $50,000 for the site development fee and the actual revenue share to the city,” he said.

Council member Theresa Pontieri was concerned about the lease terms that did not seem to make any provision for inflation. But the city will generate the same increases in revenue that Diamond generates when it increases its dues from carriers. The council will formally approve Diamond’s application for a special exception–a land use requirement–in the near future, after the proposal goes before the city’s planning board.