BANGOR – During a special meeting Wednesday, city councilors voted 6-1 to scale back a moratorium on virtually all development in the city’s rural areas to just towers and turbines.

That was the original intent of a council order that went before councilors a week ago.

The original moratorium on radio and television towers and wind turbines, however, was expanded at that time to include everything except single-family homes, accessory buildings, such as garages, and cellular telephone towers, which are covered by the Federal Communications Act of 1996.

As it turned out, however, the expanded moratorium had some unintended consequences in that it put a hold on several other projects, including home offices, improvements to a gravel pit access road and a planned farm expansion.

The original moratorium initiative was prompted by a plan to put up four 276-foot-tall antennae towers for a proposed AM radio station on outer Broadway. Charles Hecht and his business partner, Alfredo Alonso of Pittstown, N.J., are looking to build the station on a 51.6-acre parcel at 2110 Broadway, about six-tenths of a mile toward town from the intersection of Broadway and Pushaw Road.

The two won permission to move forward with the project when the city’s planning board voted 3-2 on July 3 to grant them conditional use approval for the station’s antennae.

Councilors agreed to consider a moratorium after neighbors of the proposed radio station site raised concerns about the project. Complaints included potential health effects of radio waves, detrimental impact on wildlife, obstruction of pastoral views, and decreased property values.

The councilors eventually voted 5-4 on Oct. 10 in favor of an expanded moratorium on all development in rural areas of the city. Councilor Richard Stone said this week that he lobbied for the expanded moratorium on Oct. 10 because he wanted some time to look at the broad array of land uses allowed in the city’s rural residence and agricultural districts, which make up about 35 percent of the city.

Those districts also are where much of the city’s recent housing development has occurred.

Some of the allowed uses in such districts, including kennels and quarries, seem incompatible to residential living.

During Wednesday’s special meeting, however, Stone acknowledged that the expanded moratorium went too far.

“Even though I tried to frame it properly, it had some ill-conceived consequences,” Stone said of the expanded version of the moratorium.

“This is sort of like trawling the ocean with a net,” he said. “Sometimes you catch some fish you don’t want to catch, and I think we caught some fish that we didn’t want to catch. I made a mistake and I’m trying to right that by taking it back a step.”

Before the council voted, Bangor attorney Timothy Woodcock, who along with colleague Andy Hamilton is representing Hecht and Alonso, asked councilors to put off any moratorium pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed in Penobscot County Superior Court seeking to overturn the planning board’s approval of the radio antennae location.

During earlier meetings, Woodcock and Hamilton argued that the councilors had not met the requirements of the state’s moratorium law because they had failed to make the case for “serious public harm.”

Voting Wednesday in favor of scaling back the moratorium were Chairman Richard Greene, Patricia Blanchette, Geoffrey Gratwick, Susan Hawes, Gerry Palmer and Stone. Councilor Peter D’Errico, who disagreed the moratorium was warranted, cast the sole opposing vote.