East Hampton Town Proposes 185-Foot Cell Tower In Springs

East Hampton Town officials this week unveiled plans to put a 185-foot-tall monopole communications tower on a parcel of Springs land that town experts say will blanket Springs and parts of Northwest Woods with reliable cellular telephone service and emergency communications.

The tower would be built on land owned by the town between Norfolk Street and Crandall Street, one block south of Fort Pond Boulevard, and could hold antennas from at least three cellular phone companies as well as the communications equipment that connects all of the town’s police and fire departments.

Drafting construction plans for the tower will require several months of engineering and design so the town plans to put up a temporary, 100-foot-tall “cell on wheels” tower first, as a stop-gap measure to improve emergency communications and cellular service for at least the two major cellular carriers more quickly.

The temporary tower could potentially be up and operational by winter, Town Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said.

The proposal by the town to build a tower on the town-owned land comes after two years of wrestling with the options for improving wireless communications in the hamlet.

Police and firefighters have complained for years that radio systems were unusable in far reaches of Springs and Northwest Woods and residents have flooded the town with tales of being unable to report an emergency because they could not get cell service.

The town had weighed the possibility of using an existing tower at the Springs Fire Department or building a new one at a Girl Scouts camp off Flaggy Hole Road

The possibility of using the Crandall Street property had been overlooked because town planners had initially thought the property had been designated as nature preserve, until longtime Nature Preserve Committee member Zachary Cohen called to their attention that it is not, in fact, protected.

The property has proven seemingly ideal, as it is large enough to mostly meet the safety setback considerations for such towers. The fall zone of a tower, which is the area that ice or other debris falling from the tower could pose a safety threat within, is defined by a circle with a radius twice the height of the tower — or 370 feet for a 185-foot-tall tower. The tower the town is proposing would not require any variances at the height of the cellular equipment but may require variances for the much higher town emergency equipment. The town ZBA granted such variances for a tower constructed last year on Old Northwest Road.

The town recently hired a consulting company, CityScape, to help it draft a new wireless communications master plan, including identifying the places it could add towers most efficiently to improve coverage. The Town Board has said it would prefer to have more, taller town-owned towers that would eliminate competitive exclusion of some cellular companies from towers, leading to the need for more of the unsightly structures.

“We’d like to ultimately place a permanent tower on this property and have the town in control of leasing that location to all the prominent carriers,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said on Tuesday at a Town Board meeting. “Part of the problem is that the carriers compete with each other, they don’t want to share locations and … we’ve had a proliferation of towers all over town for that reason.”

Councilman Jeff Bragman said that despite the urgency of getting new antennas up, the town needs to do a careful review of the proposal for the Crandall Street site, considering alternatives and taking care to involve residents of the surrounding neighborhoods in the discussion.

“This is a big decision, and that doesn’t mean that I don’t care about cell phone service,” he said. “It may take a little time.”

He also said he is in favor of the town considering the Springs Fire Department site as a possible temporary location while it explores options for a permanent site, but other board members said the fire district tower is too tangled in legal complications to be feasible.

The Springs Fire District has pleaded with the town to use the existing tower at the district’s headquarters, less than a mile up Fort Pond Boulevard from the Crandall Street site.

The district, in a letter from its attorney Carl Irace this week, offered that the town could use an existing 150-foot-tall tower on the property instead of the shorter temporary tower the town has proposed.

The fire district erected the tower in 2015 with plans to mount emergency communications equipment on it along with the antennas of the main cellular service providers, for which the fire district could have earned over $100,000 a year in rental revenues.

Neighbors appealed to the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals, claiming that the building permits were issued inappropriately and the ZBA revoked the tower’s building permit, saying the fire district had not gone through the proper review process. After the fire district sued, a court sided with the ZBA.

An appeal of that ruling is still pending, but the district has repeatedly asked the town to mount its emergency equipment on the tower, an avenue to getting the town to approve its existence.

In the meantime, the $12 million project to upgrade the town’s emergency communications system has rendered the existing tower obsolete, since it is neither strong enough nor tall enough for the town to use with the new system in the longterm.

The district has applied to the Planning Board for permission to build a stouter, taller tower on a different location on the fire district property. The Planning Board bogged down the proposal though, saying it would have to go through an especially detailed level of review that adds months and tens of thousands of dollars in costs to the approval process.

Board members on Tuesday said that the prospects for the new tower winning proper approvals are complicated by it’s height and the closeness of residential structures that would require some 30 variances from “fall zone” requirements in town codes.

Skeptics of the town’s reasoning and the many hurdles the fire district has faced from the town have noted that the neighbor who led the legal challenge to the tower, David Kelley, is the brother of East Hampton Town Democratic Party campaign manager Chris Kelley, and a is a major donor to the party.

Town Board members have dismissed political favoritism claims, but have noted that Mr. Kelley and his neighbors have threatened further legal challenges if a tower is approved on the fire district land, potentially delaying its availability for years.

“The firehouse tower has been ruled illegal by the courts and there has been some pressure to have that tower removed,” Mr. Van Scoyoc said. “Given the history of litigation with that location, I think it’s more prudent that the town choose a location that has the greatest certainty of success.”

Supporters of the fire district have challenged this stance, saying that the existing tower simply needs to go through site plan review, something that the town has shown can be done very quickly when its own interests are at hand.

Last year, the Planning Board reviewed and approved an application for a 180-foot tower on town land in Northwest in less than a month after a court settlement gave the town just 60 days to approve a new tower or be forced to let AT&T put its antennas on a windmill at Iacono Farms, which the Planning Board had previously rejected.

“There is a 150-foot tower that exists already — it should be used immediately,” said Tina Piette, who has championed the use of the fire district tower. “You’re not the people laying on the ground who can’t call 911.”