SCARBOROUGH – The Scarborough Town Council may face stiff opposition this week as it takes a final vote on new rules that would allow cell towers to go up in more spots than currently allowed.

The council was set to approve the proposed amendments to the town’s zoning ordinance on Wednesday, after the Current’s deadline, but the group Scarborough Families for the Responsible Placement of Cell Towers is sure to object.

However, after discussing the issue for more than a year, Council Chairman Richard Sullivan said it’s time to take a vote and move forward.

During a workshop held last week, the council got a final look at the updated proposal for allowing new cell towers in town. Town Planner Dan Bacon said the proposal takes into account many of the “key concerns and objections” that have been voiced during the past several months.

He said it’s “essentially an all new proposal designed to avoid residential neighborhoods in general.” The new rules set up a hierarchy for the siting of any new cell tower and also impose a number of restrictions.

Bacon called the new rules a “rigorous process that requires justification” to move down the list of preferred locations and said the “goal is to make it easiest to do what is most preferred.”

Under the hierarchy, anyone requesting approval to put up a new cell tower must first try to co-locate on an already existing tower. The next most preferred location would be in the town’s industrial zones, then within buildings or other structures, which is known as a “Stealth tower” (named after Stealth Network Technologies, which manufactures antennae enclosures) and finally in the proposed new Transmission Tower Overlay District.

The overlay districts would be located off Black Point Road, south of Pine Point Road on the border with Old Orchard Beach, in the Sawyer and Payne Road area and west of the Turnpike, Bacon said.

What’s important for the public to understand, according to both Bacon and Town Manager Tom Hall, is that it’s unlikely that cell towers would go up in all of the overlay districts. And Bacon is expecting that no more than five to six new towers might go up in Scarborough during the next decade.

During the Oct. 9 workshop, Councilor Jessica Holbrook asked, Ivan Pagacik, the town’s consultant on the cell tower project, if there was any way to get the companies to locate cell towers where it would help the most people.

The answer was that cell companies base their decisions on where new towers should be sited based on call statistics, including call volume and the number of calls that get dropped before being picked up by another tower.

Pagacik, who works for IDK Communications, also said that limiting cell towers only to the industrial zones, but allowing them to be up to 200 feet in height, one of the suggestions made by Scarborough Families for the Responsible Placement of Cell Towers, would not necessarily solve the town’s coverage issues.

He also said that limiting new cell towers to a specific megahertz output would not work because, going forward, the demand for ever higher speed data access will require more signal strength.

At the end of last week’s two-hour workshop, Hall said several themes emerged that he would take under advisement when preparing for Wednesday’s vote on the new cell tower rules.

Those themes were giving the Planning Board more discretion in its review of cell tower applications, including the ability to deny a request based on visual impact or other similarly subjective concerns.

In addition, while Councilor Kate St. Clair wants to ban the towers altogether, other councilors seemed willing to allow them as long as there were warning signs placed on the buildings where the towers were located.

Also, despite the views of the cell company representative, several councilors also expressed interest in allowing 200-foot towers in the town’s industrial zones in the hope that the measure might limit the overall number of new cell towers.