Ongoing Study Reveals The Breadth Of East Hampton Cell Service Gaps

Consultants gave East Hampton Town officials a roadmap for starting to address gaps in cellular service in the town. But the approach the town takes will have to be a careful one if it is to avoid a proliferation of cellular towers and so-called “small cell” antennas along town roadways, consultants told the East Hampton Town Board this week.

The consultants — a company called CityScape that helps small municipalities navigate the complexities of the wireless industry — have been laying the groundwork for an extensive update to the town’s cellular tower codes, which have not been updated since a decade before the first smart phones were introduced.

As a first step, CityScape presented the town this week with coverage maps for the entire town, illustrating in minute detail where cellular service is good, fair or essentially non-existent and where dense populations are already or soon to be overwhelming the ability of cellular facilities to provide the necessary data, even in areas with good coverage.

The CityScape engineer who is leading the study of East Hampton’s cellular situation, Susan Rabold, told Town Board members on Tuesday that the areas with lagging coverage and capacity will be ripe targets for cellular companies that will want to add antennas for their customers as quickly as possible — both in the form of towers and small cell antennas mounted on utility poles or faux lamp posts. The town will face an increasingly difficult fight to rein in the race to scramble to improve coverage if it does not tweak its codes quickly, she said.

Town lawmakers said that the coverage maps give the town an immediate jumping off point for plotting a strategy to fill in service gaps — which have sparked howls from residents and warnings about safety implications when cellular service fails in an emergency — in the most sweeping ways possible to keep the number of new towers and small cell antennas needed to a minimum.

“Now that we have really quantified where the coverage gaps are, we can go look at town-owned properties and see where we can site equipment to improve coverage,” Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez said on Tuesday during the board’s discussion with CityScape.

The town has said that it would like to adopt a proactive strategy of putting tall cellular towers on town-owned land in carefully chosen areas, and welcome as many cellular companies as possible to mount antennas on them, so as to provide the most sweeping improvements to coverage without multiple companies seeking to put up towers or mount antennas in the same regions.

Along with the coverage analysis, CityScape also presented the Town Board on Tuesday with a questionnaire that will be presented to town residents to gauge how most would like to see cellular service improvement addressed across the town.

The survey, which will be available through the town website and on various social media portals in the coming weeks, asks a broad variety of questions about where respondents live, which cellular provider they use, how their service is, whether they see improving service or minimizing visual impacts of towers as a priority and what health concerns they have about small cell and 5G technology, if any.

The consultants said that the more responses they get, the better they will be able balance the priorities of town residents, and town officials said they would use the same avenues to circulate the survey they did for the police reform surveys sent out earlier this year, which got some 1,100 responses.

The CityScape maps themselves would be unlikely to surprise any residents of East Hampton. They reveal blotches of strong cell service scattered about the town, interwoven with threads of mediocre to poor service and rimmed with a number of areas in Montauk, Springs, Northwest and Wainscott where cellular signals simply do not reach in any measurable or effective form.

The consultant said that one of most pressing concerns with the small cell technology from a regulatory standpoint is that the town has little authority to halt a new site from being installed in the utility right-of-ways along state roadways.

Ms. Rabold highlighted an illustration in her presentation that showed a street corner in another community where three small cell poles had been erected by three different companies just feet from each other on a public street corner.

“If you don’t amend your ordinance, you will have a plethora of these sites along your roadways,” Ms. Rabold said.

Attorneys for cellular providers warned the town Planning Board earlier this year that it did not have the authority to deny a proposal for four small-cell sites mounted on utility poles in Amagansett and Montauk — an advisory pregnant with the threat of a court fight should the board try to derail the proposals, which are the first of their kind in the town.

The town has already faced lawsuits from cellular providers challenging denials by planning and zoning boards on cellular site applications that test the town’s appetite for aesthetically unappealing approaches, like the concealment of antennas in a new bell tower plunked behind a small historic chapel in Springs or mounted on a windmill behind the chicken farm on Long Lane.

The consultants noted that the town may not currently use “environmental” concerns about the effects 5G signals may have on human health, as grounds for judging an application for site placement.

There are currently 42 personal wireless antenna sites existing in East Hampton Town or proposed. Three new towers have been approved and are soon to be constructed — including one “temporary” tower on town land off Stephen Hands Path.

In addition to the coverage lapses, the consultants presented a “heat map” that compared population to the number of antenna sites, which showed that the northern reaches of the town are in dire need of additional antenna facilities to address carrying capacity in addition to the failure of any signal at all in some areas. Those capacity shortages are likely to be most eagerly addressed using new 5G antennas on small cell poles intended to be best used for data transfer, rather than cellular calling signals.

With information from the survey in hand later this year, CityScape will be helping town staff craft new ordinances that will leave town agencies better equipped to address proposals for new facilities from providers and steer the town’s parallel priorities of providing better cellular service and protecting public health and community character.

Board members said the need to start addressing both coverage and capacity gaps is urgent in the wake of the pandemic, which overstressed the ability of cellular companies to provide reliable service.

“We certainly saw the impacts of having our population swell during the pandemic with everyone working remotely and live streaming entertainment,” Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. “It had a pretty devastating effect on our capacity.”

Springs and Northwest showed up on every map CityScape presented the town as having both the biggest coverage gaps and the most problematic imbalance on data capacity. The town has struggled to identify a suitable location to mount its own emergency communications equipment in its most densely populated region and has struggled to come to terms with the Springs Fire Department, which erected a tower on its headquarters in 2015 but has been mired in a legal struggle to be able to use the tower.

Board members acknowledged that the issues need to be addressed immediately.

“I know before WiFi calling I used to have to go outside to make calls and … it was better when the leaves were off the trees,” Ms. Burke-Gonzalez, who lives deep in Springs, related. “So we’re living it every day.”