The AT&T cell tower at
Boulan Park Middle School

Who owns the land a new cell tower sits on — and how it came to be permitted next to a public middle school and a city park. A trace through county GIS, municipal permits, and Board of Education records.

Compiled 2026-05 · all sources are public records · repo: tsd-celltower

A new tower appeared. Two questions.

A newly-constructed AT&T cell tower was inspected on site at 42°34'18.3"N 83°10'40.2"W — decimal 42.57175, -83.17783.

The tower stands on Troy School District land

Verified independently: the deed's metes-and-bounds legal description was re-traced and overlaid on the official county polygon — traverse closes to 0.16 ft, area 16.00 vs 15.98 ac, and the tower coordinates fall inside both polygons.

Three parcels — two owners

Parcels point-queried against the Oakland County GIS. The school district owns the middle-school parcel and the track (separate KEYPINs, same 4400 Livernois mailing); the City of Troy owns the park proper. Interactive map: boulan_parcels.html.

The fiber permit names the tower

Troy's "Permits Issued" database contains Metro Act ROW permit PROW2023-347, issued 2023-10-05, applicant Jeff Davis — a recurring AT&T fiber contractor:

This is the fiber backhaul for the tower — the first public document that ties AT&T infrastructure to this exact location.

The Board of Education approved it — Resolution 21-064

Every TSD Board of Education meeting since 2021-01-01 was crawled — 150 meetings, 1,684 agenda items. The lease surfaces twice: introduced 2021-06-01 as "AT & T Cell Tower Proposal" (report only), then voted 2021-06-15.

Outcome confirmed against the official June-15-2021 regular-meeting minutes. Source: TSD BoardDocs · packet + minutes in celltower_docs/.

What Resolution 21-064 actually authorizes

• A ground lease to New Cingular Wireless PCS, LLC (AT&T) of ~2,500 sq ft at the north (wooded) end of the Boulan Park Middle School site.
• The Superintendent (or designee) is authorized to negotiate, finalize, and execute the ground lease and all incidental documents.
• The packet leaned heavily on RF-safety framing — it included American Cancer Society notes, RF-radiation articles, "5G — no adverse health effects" material, plus a photo-simulation and propagation maps.

The resolution approves the lease in principle and hands execution to administration — the negotiated terms live in an "Attachment B" that travels separately.

How much is the District paid? Not in any public record

The dollar figure was traced through every public financial document — and appears in none of them:

• The Board packet — the resolution points to "Attachment B — General Parameters of Lease Agreement," but that attachment was never uploaded; no dollar figure in the packet or the minutes.
• The check register, FY11–FY26 — 224,267 line items. AT&T appears 6,519 times, but only as a vendor being paid (~$700K, for phone/data service). A check register has no revenue side.
• 64 monthly Treasurer's Reports — report revenue only as fund-level aggregates ("Local Sources"); no line-item detail.
• The ACFRs, FY21–FY25 — never mention AT&T; the District reports leases only as a lessee. The one "Facility Rentals Fund" ($117,508 of mixed rental income in FY22) was dropped from reporting after FY22.

→ The revenue is structurally invisible in public reporting. The sharpest FOIA target: the general-ledger account history for the revenue code the lease posts to — that yields the amount and the start date.

Why a tower next to a school is legal

Federal preemption does most of the work. The school district's own decision — leasing the ground — is the part that was discretionary.

Open threads & FOIA targets

Everything here is in the repo

• verify_parcel.py — deed traverse vs. county polygon
• crawl_board_meetings.py — full BoardDocs crawl
• board_meetings_2021plus.json — 150 meetings / 1,684 items
• celltower_hits.json — 22 keyword-matched items
• celltower_docs/ — the June-15-2021 packet + minutes
• boulan_parcels.html — three-parcel map
• property_boundaries.html — deed-vs-GIS map
• parcel_verification.html — verification map
• *.geojson — geometries for QGIS / Earth
• troy_permits_metro_act_*.xlsx — Metro Act permit dataset

Sources: Oakland County GIS · City of Troy Permits Issued · Troy School District BoardDocs. Scripts re-run end-to-end from public endpoints.

tsd-celltower · a public-records investigation · github.com/akarpo/tsd-celltower