Tower landowners — pay close attention if you’ve received a renegotiation letter or proposed lease amendment recently.
We’re seeing a tower company use renewals and extensions as cover to quietly renegotiate away its obligation to remove the tower at the end of the lease. The tower owner built it or acquired it. They and the carriers on the tower profited from it. For years. And now, through whatever corporate reorganization got them to where they are today, they’ve apparently decided that the cost of cleaning up their own mess should fall on the landowner. That’s not a negotiating position. That’s just greed. And sending that kind of amendment to a landowner who doesn’t know any better isn’t sharp dealing — it’s bad faith.
Let me be clear about something: there is no circumstance — none — where a landowner should agree to give up or limit a tower company’s removal obligation. Not even for a rent increase or a signing bonus. Not for an extension. Not for anything they put on the table. The obligation to remove exists because you deserve to get your land back the way you gave it. Full stop.
If you get an amendment that touches removal language in any way, don’t negotiate it. Don’t ask for something in return. Just don’t sign it. Have a question about the removal language? Call us, and we will answer it for free, because nobody deserves to be taken advantage of.
And for any company proposing it, this is the exact kind of BS that encouraged me to get into the business of representing landowners. And I will do everything I can to warn off landowners on these types of business practices.
