The city of Kalona will partner with Washington County to provide a location for a new communications tower.

At Monday’s meeting, the Kalona City Council gave the go-ahead to do a structural analysis of the city’s water tower to see whether it was suitable as a base for new county communications equipment.

“A technician will go up in the tower and take some measurements and some pictures and some readings to determine if our tower is eligible to accept a corral up there and have two 6-foot radio frequency dishes on it,” City Administrator Ryan Schlabaugh said.

The county approached the city with the idea in October because the originally planned site failed a structural test.

Schlabaugh said that if the water tower is found to be suitable, the county would place a 12-foot-by-20-foot prefabricated building on the water tower property.

“That would have all the inner workings of what they need up there,” Schlabaugh said. “It will have a stand-alone generator to provide 24/7 battery backup. There will be a conduit connected from the prefabricated unit to the tower, and they’ll bore that into the water tower.

“The conduit will go up the main access tube to the top of the tower, through the hatch, and to the two dishes up there. They will install a corral – or a railing – around it.”

Washington County Supervisor Jack Seward Jr. said that there will be telemetry hooked up to Raycom’s facility by Internet and by microwave connections at Marshalltown.

“What they have told us is that if there’s something going wrong in that shelter, they will probably know about it before we do,” Seward said.

A question was raised about maintenance of the generator at the site.

“We have maintenance contracts that will cover service of the generators,” Cara Sorrells of Washington County Communications/E911 said.

Another question was raised about environmental concerns.

Schlabaugh said he checked into whether there were any health issues associated with RF towers.

“They gave me two studies that show that there are no health issues with RF towers,” he said.

Council member Mark Robe said that he did not have any issue with the aesthetics of placing equipment atop the tower.

“It’s so high, I don’t thing anyone will really look up to notice it,” Robe said.

Schlabaugh said that allowing the county to use the water tower is beneficial to both the city and the county.

“From our perspective, it really makes sense to allow them, if the engineering supports this, that we would allow this to support our community through the 911 communications and have it go up there,” he said. “I think it would be a very beneficial thing to both the community coverage and to the county for funding.”