Cingular Wireless wants to perch a new 250-foot-tall communications tower on a farm field about three miles south of Lone Star Lake.

Margaret Glover won’t hear of it.

“It would cause a devaluation of my property … would be unsightly for the area and also disturbing the peace and tranquility of the neighborhood,” said Glover, who lives in Texas but co-owns 82 acres adjacent to the proposed tower site. “Surely there are less populated areas for such a tower of proposed height.”

Glover’s objections, among a handful of opinions sent to the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Office, will get a hearing tonight as Douglas County commissioners consider Cingular’s application for a permit. Glover’s objections are countered by a petition — signed by 20 people listing addresses in the neighborhood — that supports installation of the tower.

If approved, the permit would clear Cingular to install the tower in an 80-acre field at the northeast corner of U.S. Highway 56 and East 700 Road, on land owned by Leonard and Roxann Heffner. The tower site itself would cover less than a tenth of an acre, and a few additional spots would be reserved for guy wire anchors 200 feet away.

Sean Wyrick, a system engineer for Cingular, said the tower would help the company compete with other cellular providers. The tower would extend the company’s service area to include much of the U.S. Highway 56 corridor, which Cingular intends to cover this year between Baldwin and Carbondale.

The new tower needs to be 250 feet tall, Wyrick said, because anything shorter than that likely would fail to cover a low area along U.S. 56, just west of U.S. Highway 59.

Such a gap in coverage would make it “very possible” that Cingular would be back before government officials with plans for another tower to cover the dead area, he said. That would be in addition to another tower already envisioned near Overbrook to meet customer demands.

“The public’s seemingly insatiable demand is driving telecommunications companies to add more base stations to their wireless networks in order to expand their coverage areas to meet this demand,” Wyrick said in a letter to Lawrence-Douglas County planning commissioners.

Planning commissioners, on a 5-4 vote, recently recommended that county commissioners approve the permit.

Tonight’s meeting is scheduled to begin at 6:35 at the county courthouse, 1100 Mass.