The Town of Westlake, Texas — the wealthiest municipality in the Lone Star State — took another step this month in its ongoing fight against a federally ordered cell tower permit, filing its record excerpts with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on June 1 as the appeal moves into active briefing.
The filing, lays out the full evidentiary record the town intends to rely upon in asking the Fifth Circuit to reverse a February 4, 2026 federal court order — not merely overturning the town’s denial, but mandating that Westlake grant Vertical Bridge Development, LLC a permit to construct a wireless communications tower at its Fire Station No. 1 at 2000 Dove Road.
A Deal Made, Then Unmade
As Wireless Estimator reported in 2024, the dispute dates to December 2018, when town representatives first discussed the project and the need for a special-use permit to authorize construction. Years of discussions followed, and in January 2022 the Town Council authorized the Town Manager to execute a lease with Vertical Bridge at Fire Station No. 1. The lease was signed in November 2022 at $1,000 per month in rent, with Vertical Bridge having already agreed to reduce the tower’s planned height from 150 feet to 130 feet in response to community concerns.
Then an election replaced the mayor and virtually the entire Town Council. On July 15, 2024, the reconstituted council held a public hearing and unanimously denied Vertical Bridge’s permit application by voice vote — offering no written explanation for its decision. That procedural shortcut would prove fatal to the town’s legal position in the district court.
The Written Record That Wasn’t
Under the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, a local government denying a wireless facility permit must issue a decision that is in writing and supported by substantial evidence contained in a written record. The Supreme Court addressed this requirement directly in T-Mobile South v. City of Roswell, holding that localities must provide their reasons in writing at essentially the same time they communicate a denial — not months later after litigation has already begun.
Westlake did neither. The only contemporaneous written documentation of the July 15 vote was a set of meeting minutes approved on August 5, 2024 — minutes that Magistrate Judge Bill Davis of the Eastern District of Texas found contained no reasons whatsoever for the denial. They recorded the motion, the vote, and the result. Nothing more. Vertical Bridge filed suit 29 days after the minutes were approved, well within the TCA’s 30-day window. The case was assigned to District Judge Sean D. Jordan in the Sherman Division of the Eastern District of Texas and referred to Magistrate Judge Davis for pretrial proceedings.
A Belated Fix That Arrived Too Late
Recognizing the deficiency, the Town Council convened again on March 24, 2025 — more than seven months after the denial — and adopted Resolution No. 25-12, a 24-page document laying out detailed findings for the denial. The resolution cited the tower’s height violations — Vertical Bridge’s application was for a 130-foot tower, which the town’s own resolution measured at 134 feet above grade level on the project plans, nearly 69 feet above the town’s 65-foot maximum for wireless towers in non-residential districts — as well as setback encroachments, conflicts with the town’s Comprehensive Plan view preservation goals, potential adverse impacts on nearby property values on streets where homes range from $4 million to $6 million, and Vertical Bridge’s alleged failure to adequately explore alternative sites including the adjacent Fidelity Investments campus, the nearby Deloitte campus, VariSpace Southlake, a commercial shopping center on Andorra Drive, and a small cell deployment option.
The town also argued that Resolution No. 25-12 triggered the lease’s automatic-termination clause — asserting that the zoning denial had become final and unappealable, thereby extinguishing the lease and leaving Vertical Bridge without any property on which to build even if a court ordered the permit to issue. In the town’s framing, Vertical Bridge needed both a permit and a lease, and a court could compel only the former.
The court rejected both arguments. Magistrate Judge Davis found that the meeting minutes — not the March 2025 resolution — constituted the final action under the TCA, and that the resolution arrived far too late to qualify as the contemporaneous written record the Supreme Court required in Roswell. The Supreme Court had already found a 26-day delay too long; Westlake’s delay exceeded half a year. On the lease termination argument, the court found that the automatic-termination clause could not be triggered while Vertical Bridge’s federal challenge remained active — otherwise, the town would have created a blueprint for stripping any telecommunications company of its right to sue under the Act for projects on public land.
The Expert Battle
Before the district court reached that conclusion, the case generated a contested battle of expert witnesses. Vertical Bridge’s RF expert, Richard Anthony Conroy, testified that the fire station site was the least intrusive technically feasible option for closing a coverage gap he measured at approximately 3.5 square miles, that the Fidelity campus alternative was unavailable, and that a small cell solution would require 25 or more cells per carrier — an approach he described as unreasonable in both cost and network efficiency.
The town’s expert, Lee Afflerbach, countered that two technically feasible alternatives existed within the town’s height limits: a 130-foot tower in the wooded area of the Fidelity campus that he argued would provide essentially identical coverage, and a two-site solution using a pair of 80-foot towers — one near the fire station and one near the intersection of Davis Boulevard and Lakeshore Drive — that he concluded would provide the same or better coverage without the height and setback violations that plagued Vertical Bridge’s proposed design.
The district court did not need to resolve that expert dispute. Because the town failed to satisfy the TCA’s written-decision requirement — a deficiency the town itself ultimately conceded in its summary judgment briefing — Vertical Bridge was entitled to a mandatory injunction ordering the permit to issue without the court needing to reach the more complex effective-prohibition question.
The District Court’s Ruling
On December 9, 2025, Magistrate Judge Davis issued a Report and Recommendation concluding that Vertical Bridge’s motion for summary judgment should be granted, the town’s motion denied, and that the court should order the permit to issue. The town filed objections. District Judge Jordan conducted a de novo review, found the objections without merit, and on February 4, 2026 adopted the magistrate’s findings in full — entering not merely a reversal of the town’s denial, but a mandatory compliance order. The final judgment reads: “IT IS FURTHER ORDERED that the Defendants grant the permit that Plaintiff sought.” The town is now before the Fifth Circuit seeking to escape that obligation.
What the Fifth Circuit Must Decide
The town’s June 1 record excerpts filed with the Fifth Circuit include the full docket sheet, the notice of appeal, the final judgment, the memorandum adopting the Report and Recommendation, the Report and Recommendation itself, Resolution No. 25-12 in its entirety, the lease’s automatic-termination clause, excerpts from Conroy’s deposition, the Afflerbach expert report, and the Joint Final Pretrial Order.
The core questions before the Fifth Circuit are whether the district court was correct that the sparse meeting minutes constituted a deficient final action under the TCA, whether Resolution No. 25-12 came too late to cure that deficiency, and whether the lease’s automatic-termination clause deprived Vertical Bridge of standing to seek relief in the first place.
Whether the Fifth Circuit finds those arguments more compelling than the district court did will determine whether a cell tower ever rises above that Italian-inspired fire station on Dove Road — in a community where homes average nearly $5 million, the mean household income soars to $508,000, and reliable cellular service from AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile remains elusive for residents across a 3.5-square-mile swath of what is supposed to be one of the most privileged addresses in Texas.
