Ron Crider
Call for more info: 772-913-2209
1087 Beneva Tower company is a 185 foot Cellular and communications tower located in Sarasota Florida. We owned this tower project from 1998 to 2011. This tower project started as a single purpose tower for a local radio station owned buy Alliance Broadcasting and Joe Newman. Joe rescued the station after it had been off the air twice. The first time I built the station for him is was being operated from the original building where it had been located since the 70's. Joe brought it on the air as a One on One Sports station. That failed and the towers were dismantled. Several years later Joe tried again. This time I had to build a new tower and Travis Coggin and I built a Ted Shed Transmitter building for the Transmitter. Once again the station was back on the air. This time with studios in near the movie theater in Sarasota. I built nice studios and morning man and star of the station was Phil Grande. Once again the station failed.
After being airing the NOA weather and an ID for almost a year the tower property was purchased by the Palm Grove Mennonite Church. Once again Joe ask me to try to rescue the station as the tower rent had not been paid for well over a year. I met with Ruben Beachey the then pastor of the church to discuss a plan. I told him I wanted to build a Cellular tower on the property. Being a good business man he agreed to work with me to try to put a lease together. I agreed to try to figure out a way to get the back rent Joe Newman owed paid. Ruben, not knowing me he ask it would be OK for the church to hire a friend of the church to advise them regarding this matter. As it turned our the friend was an old friend of mine Bob Weeks. I had built towers and automation systems for Bob's stations in Daytona Beach, Palm Beach, Tallahassee and Sarasota in the past. Although I had not kept up with my relationship with Bob over the years we picked up quickly where we left off and Bob became my partner in the proposed new project.
By working with Bob we were able to keep the radio station there on the tower and eventually we purchased the station from Joe Newman and replaced the small AM tower with a new multipurpose communications tower. Our first tenant was Nextel. They first built on the old AM tower with a COW. When we finally received the approval to build the new tower they (Nextel) were so anchious to to get into operations from the new tower so they gave us an interest free loan to build the tower, $310,000.00.
Once the new tower was built we were then leasing the land from the Palm Grove Mennonite Church. Unfortunately Ruben Beachey was no longer the pastor of the church. This created a bit of a tussle with the new board of the church relating to the radio station using the tower and various conditions. With the masterful help of Bob Weeks we were able to get over the rough spots with the new board and the tower prospered. We added AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Metro PCS, Fiber Tower, Sprint and several LP FM stations.
