Jackson's City Council on Tuesday will take up two amendments to its antenna and ground license agreements with Alltel Corporation, doing business as Verizon Wireless, covering city-owned tower sites at 2320 Riverside Drive downtown and 1921 West Northside Drive near Northside Baptist Church.

The items sit on the consent agenda of the Sept. 22 regular meeting, according to the agenda posted by the Municipal Clerk (jacksonms.gov). Consent items are enacted by a single motion with no separate discussion unless a council member pulls one for debate.

The Riverside Drive item is styled as the fourth amendment to a master agreement that combines a ground license and an antenna site license. It authorizes the mayor to modify the equipment, extend the term, and change the licensee's notice address at Tower Site #2.

The West Northside Drive item is the third amendment to a separate antenna site license at Tower Site #13. It amends the equipment, modifies the notice address, and extends the terms of that agreement.

Both items are sponsored by Ward 7 Councilman Kevin Parkinson and referred to the administration under Horhn, the council's routing shorthand for the mayor's office. Neither the agenda nor the notice packet posted with it discloses the rent, the length of the extensions, or the value of the equipment changes.

That silence is the story. Jackson owns the dirt under both towers, which means the city is the landlord in these deals. A ground lease and an antenna site license are two separate revenue streams on the same parcel, and extending both at once resets the clock on income the city collects from a national carrier.

The two sites are not incidental. Riverside Drive runs along the downtown riverfront, and the Northside Drive site sits in a dense commercial corridor. Tower leases in those locations carry value precisely because the carrier cannot easily replicate the coverage.

The council has handled Verizon site paperwork before. The Sept. 22 packet describes the Riverside amendment as the fourth to that master agreement and the Northside amendment as the third to that license, meaning the city has renegotiated both sites repeatedly rather than rebidding them.

There is a second money item on the same agenda that touches the same theme of city assets and third-party use. Item 21 authorizes a payment to Entergy Mississippi to raise an electric power line that conflicts with a mast arm being erected under the Traffic Signal Group B improvements project, a direct cost of building on rights of way the city shares with the utility.

The council also will introduce an ordinance amending solid waste facility disposal fees and take up a resolution supporting an agreement with Municipal Intercept Company for collecting unpaid city debts, both of which have drawn attention in recent weeks. The tower amendments have not.

What's next: The council meets at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 22, in Council Chambers at 219 S. President St. Because both Verizon items are on the consent agenda, they pass without a recorded individual vote unless a member pulls them. Watch whether any council member asks for the lease terms in open session, and watch the Municipal Clerk's posted minutes for the recorded disposition. The city has not published the rent schedule or extension length for either site, and the Department of Administration, which handles the licenses, is the office that would have to produce them.

The next scheduled council work is the regular meeting cycle that follows, with committee agendas posted to the city's meetings page. If the amendments pass on consent, the terms become public only through the executed agreements, which the city is not required to post. A resident who wants the numbers can request them from the Municipal Clerk under the Mississippi Public Records Act.