Veteran Triangle cell-tower developers have formed a new venture to build compact cell towers in dense urban areas with $80.85 million in backing.

Eco-Site, based in Chapel Hill, will buy and mitigate brownfields and blighted areas as sites for cell towers that can be less than half the size of conventional wireless towers.

Eco-Site includes three former executives from Cary-based SpectraSite, which was acquired by a competitor in 2005. Eco-Site will also work with Cherokee Partners, a Raleigh company that specializes in cleaning up polluted sites.

The venture was announced Friday by the lead funder, MSouth Equity Partners, in Atlanta. The first phase of funding is $10.6 million, giving MSouth an ownership stake in Eco-Site and three of five slots on Eco-Site's board.

"This is all about increasing capacity for 4G and LTE," said Eco-Site co-founder and CEO Dale Carey. "There's a real green element to what we're doing: We're going to use natural gas generators and many of these sites will be esthetically enhanced with landscaping."

By Virginia Bridges

South Durham residents fighting a planned cell tower that would be disguised as a pine tree will have another chance to make their case after the Board of Adjustment returned the case to a review panel Tuesday.

An application for the controversial 120-foot-tall tower, which would be located by St. Barbara Greek Orthodox Church at 8306 N.C. 751, was submitted on behalf of an engineer who would be developing the tower for the Sprint Nextel Corp.

In general, land-use rules in the city and the county require applications for freestanding concealed towers to be complete and demonstrate that the structure would be compatible with adjacent structures and landscapes.  The Development Review Board, an internal review board that approves such towers, determined in June that the application met all the requirements by an 8-1 vote.