Client Successes

Nearly 300-Foot Tower Was Proposed for Historic Road

Best Best & Krieger attorney James Hobson helped a small Texas community prevent a major telecommunications company from building a nearly 300-foot-tall, lattice-style cellular phone tower along a scenic and historic road.

The citizens of Brenham, Texas formed a group known as CAVEAT (Citizens Against Verizon’s Enormous Antenna Tower) after Verizon had filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission on June 27 to build the tower along La Bahia Road. The road was originally an east-west Indian trail in southwestern Louisiana and southeastern Texas. The citizen’s group contacted politicians at the local and federal levels, sought help from historic commissions and hired attorneys to aid them in their quest to stop the tower from being constructed.

Hobson, based in BB&K’s Washington, D.C., office, helped the citizens group understand the documents submitted by Verizon to the FCC, strongly urged the group to maintain local pressure for an alternative site for the tower and advised it to file papers with the National Register of Historic Places to determine if the landscape that would be affected by the massive tower was eligible for selection to the list.

On Sept. 10, Verizon notified the FCC that it decided to withdraw its application and canceled the project on La Bahia Road.