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100 years ago — 1921
SALISBURY — Herbert Edelman has returned to New Haven. While at his home here he gave his mother’s house a coat of white paint.
Beginning January 1st the new plan of auto registration will become effective. The charge per horse power is increased from 50 to 75 cents and is calculated from the number of cubic inches piston displacement. Under the new system, the fee for all passenger cars is determined by the following formula: The diameter of the bore in inches, squared, multiplied by 0.7854, multiplied by the number of cylinders. The result of this compilation gives the number of cubic inches of cylinder displacement and the fee is reckoned at eight cents per cubic inch. For the owner of a Ford this means a fee of $15 in 1922. No car can be registered for less than $15.
LIME ROCK — If anyone has seen a stray tiger cat will they please notify Perry Loucks.
60 years ago — 1961
A new building, a new interest and a new occupation has been added to the six-town area on a stretch of land bordering the Housatonic just north of Dutchers Bridge and opposite Green Acres, Canaan. Here Fiorello (“Jerry”) Segalla is completing spacious training stables for thoroughbred race horses. They will be known as Green Acres Stables. The good-looking, creamy pink building (220 feet long by 52 feet wide) has a 540 foot indoor track and box stalls for 32 animals plus a wing which houses an office, a tack room with large stone fireplace, lavatories and a furnace room. Outdoors, the big tract of land flanking the river will, when landscaping is completed, boast seven or eight paddocks and a regulation half-mile training track.
Perry Mason should be called in to solve The Case of the Missing Deer — it’s too much for the Canaan State Police! Edward H. Belter of Wassaic, N.Y. was traveling west on Route 4 in Sharon at 5:15 last Monday afternoon when a light eight-point buck jumped in front of his car and was killed. Mr. Belter went to a neighboring house a quarter of a mile down the road to report the accident. When he returned to the scene of the accident, the deer was gone and a bale of hay was left in its place. Was the hay a down payment on the deer? Or could a truck loaded with hay have been passing and threw off the bale to make room for the dead deer? Trooper George Zuraitis, who investigated, is baffled.
Harry Bartram reported on Monday evening that he had received 41 contributions for the Town Clock Fund in response to a letter sent out in mid-November to about 170 Sharon residents asking for money for electrifying the Town Clock. He said that he was confident that enough money would be raised for the project but added that any money received in excess of that needed to make the change would be put in a permanent fund for maintenance of the clock.
CANAAN — William Merriman of East Main Street was elected president of the Tomorrow’s Farmers 4-H Club at a recent meeting. The other officers are Harold Wickwire, vice president; Althea Vanicky, secretary-reporter; and Bruce Vanicky, treasurer. The club leader is Michael Vanicky of Allyndale Road.
— Leslie Mallinson, Postmaster at West Cornwall, has announced that the Rural Route has been extended to provide year round service for the patrons between Scoville’s Corner and Yelping Hill entrance. In former years this portion of the route was not provided service between November 1st and May 1st.
25 years ago — 1996
Catamount ski area on Route 23 in Hillsdale, N.Y., Mohawk Mountain in Cornwall, and Butternut Basin on Route 23, east of Great Barrington, are all scheduled to open this Friday, provided there is enough snow from either a storm or from artificial snow-making, or a combination of both.
— Thirteen Region 1 students were honored last week at the annual Litchfield County Superintendents Association student recognition awards program. They were: Kelly Downey and Daniel Evon from Lee H. Kellogg School in Falls Village; Nicholas Hunter from Cornwall Consolidated School; Julia Devaux and Charles Vick, Kent Center School; Erin Godburn and Eric Rhynhart, North Canaan Elementary School; James Hutchings and Erin Kowtko, Salisbury Central School; Allison MacInnes and Melissa Moskowitz, Sharon Center School; and Cynthia Matthews and Roberta Yerkes, Housatonic Valley Regional High School.
These items were taken from The Lakeville Journal archives at Salisbury’s Scoville Memorial Library, keeping the original wording intact as possible.
The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Lakeville Journal and The Journal does not support or oppose candidates for public office.
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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.