tsd-celltower — AT&T cell tower inquiry (Boulan Park, Troy MI)

Investigation into a newly-constructed AT&T cell tower near Boulan Park and Boulan Park Middle School in Troy, MI: who owns the land it sits on, and how it came to be permitted next to a school and a park.

This folder is a self-contained handoff — open it in Claude Code to continue. See index.html for a single-page slide-deck summary of everything below.

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The question

A new AT&T cell tower was constructed at 42°34'18.3"N 83°10'40.2"W (decimal 42.57175, -83.17783), inspected on site by the owner of this inquiry. Goals: (1) identify the property owner, (2) understand why it was allowed so close to a school and park.

What's been established so far

Location. The coordinates fall on the Boulan Park Middle School parcel, 3570 Northfield Pkwy, Troy — off Crooks Rd between Big Beaver and Wattles.

The fiber permit. Troy's "Permits Issued" database (see sibling project cot-permits) contains Metro Act ROW permit PROW2023-347, issued 2023-10-05, applicant Jeff Davis (a recurring AT&T fiber contractor):

"Directional bore and place 2" PC from the pole at Wattles and Northfield Pkwy south for approximately 1950'. Set 2 new hand holes in ROW. To provide service to new proposed AT&T mobility cell site." This is the fiber backhaul for the tower. (Full Metro Act dataset snapshot: troy_permits_metro_act_2026-05-14_0750.xlsx in this folder.)

The parcel. Oakland County KEYPIN 2020100003 (= Troy parcel 88-20-20-100-003), 3570 Northfield Pkwy:

• Tax-exempt — assessed value $0, taxable value $0 → publicly owned, consistent with Troy School District land.
• Owner mailing address: 4400 Livernois Rd, Troy (likely TSD administration — unconfirmed; owner names are redacted in the county's public layer).

Adjacent parcels (point-queried against the Oakland County GIS). Three parcels make up the Boulan Park area — see boulan_parcels.html:

• 2020100003 — Boulan Park Middle School, 15.97 ac — mailing 4400 Livernois Rd → Troy School District (the cell-tower parcel).
• 2020227037 — the athletic track, 5.75 ac — same mailing address, 4400 Livernois Rd → Troy School District (separate KEYPIN, same campus).
• 2020226092 — Boulan Park proper, 47.14 ac — mailing 500 W Big Beaver Rd (Troy City Hall) → City of Troy. All three are tax-exempt; ownership is inferred from the tax-mailing address (owner names redacted in the public layer).

The Board of Education approval. ✅ Found. Every TSD Board meeting 2021-01-01 → present (150 meetings, 1,684 agenda items) was crawled — see crawl_board_meetings.py / board_meetings_2021plus.json. The lease was approved 2021-06-15 as Resolution 21-064, on a 4–2 vote (Yes: Anne, Gottlieb, Philippart, Wilson; No: Hauff, Schmidt; Absent: Hammond). It was introduced 2021-06-01 as "AT & T Cell Tower Proposal" (report only). The resolution authorizes the Superintendent to negotiate and execute a ground lease with New Cingular Wireless PCS, LLC (AT&T) for ~2,500 sq ft at the north (wooded) end of the site. The 10-document June-15 packet is in celltower_docs/. The dollar terms are not in the public record — the resolution's "Attachment B (General Parameters of Lease Agreement)" was never uploaded, and the financials were likely settled in the June-15 closed session.

The lease revenue — traced through every public financial record, not found. The amount Troy School District receives does not appear in any public financial document:

• Check register, FY11–FY26 (sibling project ~/Downloads/tsd-checkregister/) — 224,267 line items. AT&T appears 6,519 times but only as a vendor being paid (~$700K total, for phone/data service). A check register records disbursements only — it has no revenue side.
• Monthly Treasurer's Reports — all 64 (Nov 2020 → Feb 2026) located on BoardDocs; their "Financial Statements" PDF reports revenue only as fund-level aggregates (Local / State / Federal Sources), with no account-level detail.
• ACFRs FY21–FY25 (in ~/Downloads/tsd-budget/boarddocs/) — no mention of AT&T / Cingular / cell tower / antenna in any year; the District reports GASB 87 leases only as a lessee, never as a lessor. The one dedicated Facility Rentals Fund (535) — "moneys generated from the rental of various facilities" — showed $117,508 of (mixed) rental revenue in FY22, then was dropped from ACFR reporting FY23+, folding facility-rental income into the General Fund's un-itemized "Local Sources."

→ The revenue is structurally invisible in public financial reporting; it can only be obtained by FOIA (see Open threads).

Legal-description verification. The deed legal description — T2N R11E SEC 20, PART OF SE 1/4 OF NW 1/4, BEG ... 16 A — was traced and overlaid on the official county parcel (see verify_parcel.py):

• Traverse closes to 0.16 ft (internally consistent).
• Area 16.00 ac (description) vs 15.98 ac (county) — match within 0.1%.
• Corners agree within 20–42 ft (normal deed-vs-GIS digitizing variance).
• The tower coordinates fall inside both polygons. ✅ Confirmed: the tower is on parcel 2020100003 / 3570 Northfield Pkwy.

Why it was (legally) allowed near a school/park. Mostly federal preemption:

• Telecommunications Act of 1996 §704 (47 U.S.C. §332(c)(7)) — localities may not deny/regulate a wireless facility based on RF-emission health concerns if it meets FCC limits.
• FCC "shot clocks" — must act within fixed deadlines or it's deemed granted.
• Michigan wireless siting law (MCL 125.3514) — collocations are by-right; new support structures get special-land-use review on a ~90-day clock.

Files in this folder

File	What it is
index.html	Self-contained, single-page slide deck summarizing the whole investigation — also the GitHub Pages entry point. Open in a browser; arrow keys / on-screen controls to navigate.
verify_parcel.py	Traces the metes-and-bounds legal description, fetches the official Oakland County parcel geometry, overlays them, checks the tower point. Run: python3 verify_parcel.py (needs requests).
parcel_verification.html	Interactive Leaflet map — legal description shaded orange, official parcel outlined blue, tower / Point-of-Beginning / Section-20 center marked.
parcel_verification.geojson	Same geometry as GeoJSON (load in QGIS / Google Earth / geojson.io).
property_boundaries.html	Polished Leaflet map of the middle-school parcel — official vs. deed-reconstructed boundary, layer toggles, scale bar.
boulan_parcels.html	Three-parcel map: middle school + athletic track (TSD) + Boulan Park (City of Troy), color-coded, with owner/KEYPIN/area popups.
boulan_parcels.geojson	The three parcel geometries + tower/probe points as GeoJSON.
crawl_board_meetings.py	Pulls every TSD Board of Education meeting since 2021-01-01 and scans all agenda items for tower keywords. Reuses the BoardDocs client from the sibling tsd-budget project. Run: python3 crawl_board_meetings.py.
board_meetings_2021plus.json	Full corpus: every meeting, every agenda item (150 meetings / 1,684 items).
celltower_hits.json	The 22 agenda items whose title/action matched tower keywords.
celltower_docs/	The June-15-2021 Board packet (resolution, lease presentation, site plan, RF-safety articles) + the June-15 regular-meeting minutes confirming the 4–2 vote. See manifest.json inside.
troy_permits_metro_act_2026-05-14_0750.xlsx	Snapshot of all Troy "ROW, METRO ACT" permits — the dataset that surfaced PROW2023-347. Regenerated canonically by the cot-permits scraper.

Open threads / next steps

1. Confirm ownership. Look up KEYPINs 2020100003 (middle school), 2020227037 (track) and 2020226092 (City park) at the Troy Parcel Information Center — https://apps.troymi.gov/ParcelInformationCenter (reCAPTCHA-gated, do it in a browser) — to de-redact the owner names.
2. Find the board approval. ✅ DONE — Resolution 21-064, approved 2021-06-15 on a 4–2 vote. See crawl_board_meetings.py and celltower_docs/. The remaining gap is the money: get the lease's dollar terms (next item).
3. Get the lease revenue / terms — FOIA. The dollar figure is not in any public record — not the resolution packet, not the minutes, not the FY11–FY26 check register, not the 64 monthly Treasurer's Reports, not the FY21–FY25 ACFRs (see "What's been established"). FOIA Troy School District for (a) the executed AT&T ground lease, (b) Attachment B to Resolution 21-064, (c) the 2021-06-15 closed-session minutes (the BoardDocs closed-session file 404s), and — the sharpest single ask — (d) the general-ledger account history (FY21–FY26) for the revenue object code the AT&T lease posts to, which yields both the amount and the commencement date.
4. FOIA targets (City side). City of Troy: site plan, special-land-use / Planning Commission file, and the building permit for the AT&T cell structure (separate from the Metro Act fiber permit).
5. Building permit. When the cot-permits File 2 scrape (troy_permits_all_other_*.xlsx) finishes, grep it for the tower's building permit — AT&T applicant, parcel 88-20-20-100-003, keywords tower / monopole / cell / wireless / antenna.

Data sources & endpoints discovered

• Troy permits API — https://apps.troymi.gov/PermitsIssued/Results (params PageNumber, PermitType; needs a browser User-Agent). Scraped by the cot-permits project.
• Oakland County parcel REST — https://gisservices.oakgov.com/arcgis/rest/services/Enterprise/EnterpriseOpenParcelDataMapService/MapServer/1 (layer "Tax Parcel Plus"; query by KEYPIN). Used by verify_parcel.py.
• Troy Parcel Information Center — https://apps.troymi.gov/ParcelInformationCenter (reCAPTCHA-gated; manual lookups only).
• Troy public meetings / agendas — https://apps.troymi.gov/Meetings (City Planning Commission & City Council records — the city-side approval).
• TSD BoardDocs — https://go.boarddocs.com/mi/troysd/Board.nsf (committee A4EP6J588C05; the school-district-side records). Tooling in ~/Downloads/tsd-budget/scripts/.

Related folders

• ~/Downloads/cot-permits/ — the Troy permits scraper (scrape_permits.py). A long full-database scrape may still be running; let it finish.
• ~/Downloads/tsd-budget/ — Troy School District budget project; its scripts/ folder is the BoardDocs harvesting toolkit referenced above.