FALLS VILLAGE — Long-time followers of the Salisbury Winter Sports Association’s ski jumps will remember a youngster named Ariel Picton, who started ski jumping in Salisbury at age nine.
Now married with two children and living in New Hampshire, Ariel Picton Kobayashi is the author of the just-published “Ski Jumping in the Northeast: Small Towns and Big Dreams.”
Kobayashi held a Zoom talk Thursday, Jan. 22, sponsored by the David M. Hunt Library.
She recalled her introduction to the sport as a child, and her work as a coach for SWSA some years later.
The first section of the book is based on her senior project as a history major at the State University of New York — Purchase.
She noted that SWSA is celebrating its 100th year of ski jumping.
The year it all started, 1926, is when ski jumping was becoming popular in the northeastern United States. The original name of SWSA was the Salisbury Outing Club.
There were dozens of small towns with jumps in the Northeast. Colleges had jump hills, and sponsored winter carnival events.
Excursion trains ran from big cities such as New York and Boston, taking urban skiers to the rural towns.
She cited SWSA’s Larry Stone remembering that in the 1950s, Salisbury had eight or nine jumps, including jumps in back yards. Children took to ski jumping the way they did to baseball in the summer.
But over time the clubs faltered and by the 1970s most of the ski jumping venues closed down.
Kobayashi said that one factor in the decline of ski jumping was the famous “Agony of Defeat” television clip that showed a ski jumper in a spectacular crash. This clip was used every Saturday in the intro to ABC television’s “Wide World of Sports.”
“It was shown over and over again,” she said.
Another blow came in 1981, when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) dropped ski jumping as a sanctioned college sport.
“This had a ripple effect all the way down to the local level,” she said. Young jumpers no longer had a “clear college pathway,” and the number of jumpers continued to drop.
SWSA was one of the few clubs to survive the decline, which Kobayashi attributed to the strong ties between SWSA and the community as a whole.
Screenshot from Zoom
“I was lucky to have SWSA.”
The book contains a section on hill preparation. “It’s not glamorous, it’s not about individual performance,” she said.
“It’s about everyone working for a common goal.”
The book also addresses women in the sport. Kobayashi said the first documented female ski jumper was Paula Lamberg, an Austrian countess who competed in 1911 wearing a long black dress (and set a record while she was at it).
She said a long-standing myth persisted, that ski jumping was bad for girls because it had a negative effect on their ability to have children.
Things started to change for the better in 2009, with the popularity of alpine skier Lindsey Vonn, and finally, in 2014, female jumpers were allowed in the Olympics.
Kobayashi said this happened because of “persistence, community, showing up when the system isn’t designed for them.”
Telecom Reg’s Best Kept On the Books
When Connecticut land-use commissions update their regulations, it seems like a no-brainer to jettison old telecommunications regulations adopted decades ago during a short-lived period when municipalities had authority to regulate second generation (2G) transmissions prior to the Connecticut Siting Council (CSC) being ordered by a state court in 2000 to regulate all cell tower infrastructure as “functionally equivalent” services.
It is far better to update those regs instead, especially for macro-towers given new technologies like small cells. Even though only ‘advisory’ to the CSC, the preferences of towns by law must be taken into consideration in CSC decision making. Detailed telecom regs – not just a general wish list -- are evidence that a town has put considerable thought into where they prefer such infrastructure be sited without prohibiting service that many – though not all – citizens want and that first responders rely on for public safety.
Such regs come in handy when egregious tower sites are proposed in sensitive areas, typically on private land. The regs are a town’s first line of defense, especially when cross referenced to plans of conservation and development, P&Z regulations, and wetlands setbacks. They identify how/where the town plans to intersect with the CSC process. They are also a roadmap for service providers regarding preferred sites and sometimes less neighborhood contention. In fact, to have no telecom regs can weaken a town’s rights to protect environmental, scenic, and historic assets, and serve up whole neighborhoods to unnecessary overlapping coverage and corporate overreach. Such regs are unique to every town and should not follow anyone else’s boiler plate, especially industry’s.
Connecticut is the only state that has a centralized siting entity for cell towers. The good news is that applicants must prove need for new tower sites in an evidentiary proceeding and any decisions have the weight of the state behind them. The bad news is that the CSC used to be far less industry-friendly and rote in their reviews, which now resemble a check list. There is an operative assumption at CSC that if an applicant wants a tower, they must need it, otherwise why spend significant money to run the approval gauntlet? This reflects a subtle shift over the years at CSC from sincere willingness to protect the environment toward minimal tweaking of bad applications with minor changes. The bottom line is that towns really cannot rely on the CSC to do all the work for them.
What CSC issues telecom providers is a “certificate of environmental compatibility” after an evidentiary proceeding (not unlike a court case) with intervenors, parties, expert witnesses, and the service provider’s technical pro’s sworn in and subject to cross examination. Service providers get to do the same with any opposition from intervenor/party participants – like towns and citizens -- and their experts. It’s an impressive process whose ultimate goal is the fine balancing between allowing adequate/reliable public services and protecting state ecology with minimal damage to scenic, historic, and recreational values. They unfortunately often fall short of their mandate – like approving cell towers with diesel generators over town aquifers -- evidenced by CSC only rejecting about five cell towers in the past 15-20 years.
The CSC was founded in 1972 and clarified its mission in the 1980’s to prevent the state from being carved up willy-nilly by gas pipelines, high tension corridors, and broadcast towers. With the sudden proliferation of cell towers beginning in late 1990’s, it became the most sued agency in Connecticut by both an arrogant upstart industry if applications were denied and by towns/citizens when bad sites were forced on them. CSC gradually formed a defensive posture that drives their decisions toward industry with deeper pockets and attorneys on retainer.
For citizens, nothing can wreck one’s day like the CSC. It behooves towns to protect what little toolkit they have, and understand the legal parameters of the CSC’s playing field. The CSC is not a “normal” government agency where municipal/citizen redress is based on logic and local support. Their process is largely immune to everything but specific kinds of evidence – like town regs with setbacks/fall zones, radio frequency transmission signal strengths, sensitive areas identified, and detailed wildlife inventory, among others.
There is a current cell tower fight involving two intervening towns -- Washington and Warren; both with good cell tower regs – over a tower site within 1200’ of a Montessori School, near Steep Rock’s nature preserves with comprehensive geology/wildlife databases that include endangered, threatened and special concern flora and fauna, on established federal/state migratory bird flyways, within throwing distance to a historic site capable of being listed on the Underground Railroad, and with an access road on a blind curve entering a state highway that will permanently damage wetlands, vernal pools, and core forests. There are well credentialed environmental experts, including Dr. Michael Klemens, former chair of Salisbury’s P&Z, as well as the former director of migratory bird management at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and an RF engineer testifying to alternative approaches, plus three attorneys representing intervenors. It is the most professional challenge I have seen at CSC since Falls Village successfully mounted one that protected Robbins Swamps several years ago.
The hearing is ongoing, with uncertain results. To see what it takes today to stop an inappropriate tower siting, see Docket #543 under “Pending Matters” at https://portal.ct.gov/csc before removing local cell tower regs – the lowest hanging fruit that any town can possess in case it’s needed.
B, Blake Levitt is the Communications Director at The Berkshire-Litchfield Environmental Council. She writes about how technology affects biology.