East Hampton Town Officials Brush Off Cellular Emergency Declaration Proposal

East Hampton Town officials this week pushed back against calls for Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc to use his power to declare a public emergency as an avenue to clear the way for a communications tower to be approved at the Springs Fire District firehouse.

Van Scoyoc said that taking such a step, which he said may not even be within his legal powers, would subvert the deliberate process for tower approvals and could open a hornet’s nest of demands for towers to be approved in the same way in other regions.

“The question of whether or not the supervisor can declare an emergency just to approve a tower in a specific location raises a number of legal questions that I’m not sure I can answer,” Van Scoyoc said on Tuesday, during a discussion with other Town Board members. “I think it’s a somewhat dubious approach to try to get approval for a tower when there is a town policy that the Planning Board reviews all tower locations for approval.”

The supervisor was responding to calls from residents of Springs, led by Manny Vilar, the chairman of the East Hampton Town Republican Party, who recently held an informational meeting at the Springs firehouse at which he introduced the idea that the supervisor could use emergency declaration powers to allow an existing tower on the site to be used.

The existing tower is 150 feet tall and sits at the rear corner of the firehouse property. When it was erected in 2015, neighbors objected and convinced the town Zoning Board of Appeals to revoke the structure’s building permit on the basis of it having been improperly issued because the tower had not been approved through a state-mandated review process. The tower has stood on the firehouse property since, unused. A lawsuit by the district seeking to compel the town to reinstate the building permit was dismissed.

The fire district has applied for a new, taller tower, that would be capable of holding both cellular antennas and the town’s emergency communications radio antennas. But the town has said it plans to put its equipment on a tower at Camp Blue Bay, on Flaggy Hole Road, less than a mile from the firehouse.

Another group of Springs residents recently called on the fire district to abandon its plans for the multi-use communications tower and focus on a cellular-only tower that would help spread cell service beyond what the Camp Blue Bay tower will. A tower concerned only with cellular communications, they said, could be shorter and would not pose as many complications as the existing tower because of its proximity to neighbors’ homes.

Van Scoyoc on Tuesday noted that 91 percent of respondents to a town survey last year said that they were more concerned about improving communication service than with the aesthetic considerations of new towers going up in residential neighborhoods.

“But we know that number changes drastically once a location is proposed,” the supervisor said. “The percentages for those in that neighborhood go dramatically in the other direction.”

Advocates for the emergency declaration have nodded to a 2020 approval by the Town Board of a tower on Stephen Hands Path.

Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez noted that the tower was to go on town owned property and that a tower proposed by a cellular provider itself has different legal standing under federal law than a tower proposed by a contracting company, like the ones at the Springs firehouse.

“There’s been a lot of misinformation,” Burke-Gonazalez said.

“Which is something we battle constantly on every level,” Councilwoman Cate Rogers echoed. “Which is why we have open offices, you can make an appointment and come in and talk to us.”

Van Scoyoc said that he would ask Springs residents who are concerned about cell service to bring their voices to the Planning Board hearings on the Camp Blue Bay tower on October 19, rather than asking that one official take unilateral action.

“I can just imagine that if I declared an emergency for a tower in Springs that someone would be asking me for a tower in Northwest,” he said. “And where would that tower go? I would just decide, a tower goes here? I don’t think that’s the democratic process.”