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FALLS VILLAGE — After the withdrawal of an application last year by Nextel-Sprint, another cellular phone facility has been proposed for Falls Village. Verizon Wireless has filed notice with the town that it wants to construct at tower just south of the intersection of Route 7 and Undermountain Road.
In a March 23 letter to Town Clerk Mary Palmer, EBI Consulting, the Manhattan-based compliance firm representing Verizon, invited the town to comment on the company’s proposal for a 150-foot-tall monopole-style "designed to resemble a pine tree."
Also called a monopine, the structure would feature branches that extend an additional seven feet above the tower. If constructed, the facility would include a 12-foot-by-30-foot equipment shelter on a 100-foot-by-100-foot lease area on or near the Epstein and Laplaca properties.
Ellery "Woods" Sinclair, the town’s coordinator of information on communications towers, said the next step would be for a formal appearance before state officials.
"We are waiting at this point to have the Siting Council schedule a hearing," Sinclair said in an interview.
According to the Siting Council’s Web site, no hearing has been scheduled yet. The Siting Council is charged with deciding where towers will be placed in Connecticut.
The recent Verizon proposal follows one last year for wireless facilities to be placed on top of an existing Connecticut Light & Power transmission tower on Beebe Hill Road. That application was withdrawn in October after the applicant, Nextel-Sprint, learned a 1942 easement granted to CL&P did not permit the construction of an equipment shelter the company needed to build. Nearby resident Carl Bornemann and his attorneys, Gabriel Seymour and Geoffrey Drury, had raised the issue.
One of the intervenors at a pre-hearing Siting Council meeting, a Vermont-based non-profit environmental group called EMR Policy Institute, also filed a sworn statement testifying that "the proposed Beebe Hill cell tower threatens to destroy wildlife habitats; kill large numbers of nesting and migratory birds; disrupt natural food chains; and jeopardize frogs, other amphibians, and rare plants in Connecticut’s most unique inland wetland."
According to a news release issued by Janet Newton, EMR Policy Institute’s president, Ms. Newton also warned of potential harm to students at the nearby Lee H. Kellogg School. As cell tower opponents have discovered, the federal Telecommunications Act of 1996 does not permit health effects to be considered as part of cell tower applications. But according to Seymour, wildlife is a different matter.
The EMR Policy Institute was among the sponsors of a four-hour forum Saturday in Sheffield on the health and environmental effects of cell towers and wireless technologies. Six speakers addressed topics ranging from electromagnetic fields to the legal aspects of challenging telecommunications facilities.
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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.