BUCYRUS—Bucyrus City Council tabled their plans to lease additional land to the cell tower company that provides the city’s communications.
The lawsuit filed by former Bucyrus City Council President Kurt Fankhauser was served to Interim Law Director Brian Gernert shortly before last night’s meeting.
According to the lawsuit:
On January 12, 2010, the City of Bucyrus entered into a land lease with “Cello Partnership d/b/a Verizon Wireless” for a communication tower to be erected on land owned by the municipal corporation.
The aforementioned land lease was never put out for public bid. Therefore, the city did not follow the statutory requirements outlined in O.R.C. 721.03 regarding the public bid process.
Verizon Wireless has since sold the tower lease to a tower management company named “American Tower.”
Because of the city’s failure to solicit public bids for the land lease, taxpayers in Bucyrus have been irreplaceably harmed.”
Fankhauser’s suit goes on to prove that the very first legislation for the tower was not valid.
Fankhauser attached a copy of the minutes from a council meeting held in April of 2020 that said:
“City communications tower lease – American Tower has suggested to the City that the existing lease pertaining to the City’s communication tower needs to be modified. Law Director Rob Ratliff noted that another company, TowerPoint, has offered to purchase the American Tower lease. He suggested that any change to the existing lease would be inappropriate since it had never originally gone out to bid, making the contract invalid.”
Since Gernert had just been served prior to the meeting, he advised Council to table the tower lease agreement legislation until he could further review the action taken by Fankhauser.
Crawford County Now will continue to cover this developing news story.