12.11.010 Policies, purpose and goals.
A. Provision of Opportunities for Wireless Providers. This chapter is designed to provide opportunities for wireless communication facilities (WCFs) and small wireless facilities (SWFs) consistent with rights of wireless service providers while providing for an orderly development of the city and protecting the health, safety, and general welfare of the city’s residents and property owners.
B. Preservation of Character of City. A primary objective of this chapter is to preserve the existing visual and aesthetic character of the city and its neighborhoods, as well as minimize the noise impacts generated by WCFs and SWFs. Preserving the visual and aesthetic character of the city includes the protection of views within the city which create a special character for the community, high property values and a tax base sufficient to support the city’s operations, limiting the intrusion of noise, visual, and aesthetic impacts associated with commercial and other uses into residential neighborhoods, and encouraging well-coordinated, cohesive streetscapes in those areas of the city where specific design districts are established through planning efforts and capital investments.
C. Goals. The goals of this chapter include:
1. Establishing development regulations consistent with the Imagine Bothell... Comprehensive Plan, adopted July 31, 1995, as subsequently updated;
2. Providing sites for locating WCFs and SWFs;
3. Providing WCFs and infrastructure a regulatory process free from local regulation that could effectively prohibit wireless communication providers from serving the city and its residential, educational, public safety, commercial users and visitors who use wireless services, as well as providing consumers a choice of providers and allows for continuous improvements in quality, reliability, and innovation;
4. Encouraging the use of appropriate designs that have minimal adverse environmental, noise, and visual impacts on the city and the prompt removal of abandoned facilities;
5. Prioritizing the location of WCFs upon existing nonresidential structures, in such a manner that the WCF is integrated, or appears to be integrated, into the structure;
6. Establishing standards for WCFs and SWFs to mitigate the visual and noise impacts associated with those facilities;
7. Facilitating the use of rights-of-way for WCFs and SWFs to reduce the impact of those facilities upon residential areas of the city where the siting of WCFs or SWFs in residential zoning districts is necessary or desired by a provider;
8. Facilitating the use of existing high voltage transmission towers in private rights-of-way in commercial and certain mixed use zones for WCFs to reduce the need of such facilities within residential areas and to reduce the impacts of WCFs upon residential and other properties; and
9. Encouraging the development of WCFs and SWFs on a competitively neutral basis. (Ord. 2295 § 3, 2019; Ord. 2110 § 2 (Exh. B), 2013; Ord. 1733 § 7, 1998).