Springs Residents Call for Help From Fire District

Springs residents are calling on the commissioners of the Springs Fire District to shift the focus of their efforts to get a communications tower legalized on their Fort Pond Boulevard firehouse to a smaller tower dedicated to cellular telephone service rather than police and fire emergency communications.

Members of the Springs Citizens Advisory Committee last week said that they would like to see the fire district abandon its long-simmering application for an 185-foot monopole capable of carrying heavy emergency communications antennas, in favor of a new application to East Hampton Town for a shorter cellular tower that would be able to serve areas of eastern Springs but would be less imposing on neighbors and require fewer legal hurdles be cleared.

The tower that the fire district and its contracted tower company, Elite Towers, has applied for was designed to hold antennas compatible with East Hampton Town’s new $13 million emergency communications system and lift them to a height that the town said they need to be at to link with other towers in its network.

But despite appeals by the fire district, including offering to allow the town to mount its equipment free of charge, the town has said that it intendeds to use a different tower that is also in the approval pipeline, at Camp Blue Bay, the 179-acre Girl Scouts camp on Flaggy Hole Road — about three-quarters of a mile to the west of the firehouse.

That tower has also been touted as an elixir to abysmal cellular service in Springs and Northwest, but Springs residents said that they have learned through the respective Planning Board applications that the cellular signals from the Camp Blue Bay tower will not reach all of the hamlet’s corners.

“Everyone seems to agree that Camp Blue Bay is not going to cover eastern Springs, where I just happen to live,” Loring Bolger, the committee’s chairwoman, a Neck Path resident, said on September 27. “And it’s not just coverage — it’s capacity to serve people, and each tower can only serve just so many people, so we need multiple towers.”

Bolger said that the understanding is that the Camp Blue Bay tower will not be able to deliver reliable cell service east of Accabonac Road, whereas a cell tower at the Springs firehouse would reach to Alberts Landing.

Another committee member, David Buda, recommended that the committee offer its support to the commissioners for a tower of just 100 to 120 feet tall, holding only cellular antennas, concealed inside a “stealth” monopole tower, located in the center of the fire district’s property, as far from neighboring properties as possible.

By dropping the bid to mount emergency communications equipment on the tower, the fire district could substantially reduce the height of the tower and, therefore, the impact on neighbors, while still delivering the benefit to local cellular customers that is so desperately needed, Buda said, and also get the financial benefit of leasing the site to the cellular companies.

“You’ve got two things going on here: You’ve got the police communications system, which services fire, police and ambulances, and that is one system, and that is one set of requirements that are going to be satisfied for all of Springs from Camp Blue Bay,” he said. “But then there is the cellular telephone, which is a low-power system, which needs many more nodes … you can’t reach as far with a cellphone [antenna]. You need more of them, and you need them spread out.”

The fire district already has an existing “stealth” tower similar to the one the committee said it would support — though located in a rear corner of the firehouse property, close to the residential properties that surround it.

When that tower was built in 2015, with no notice to neighbors, it sparked outrage and threats of lawsuits. A group of residents from Talmage Farm Lane appealed to the Zoning Board of Appeals and successfully got the building permit that had been issued for the tower rescinded — and an order saying that any tower on the firehouse property must go through Planning Board review.

The tower has never been taken down, but it has also never been put online — while cries from throughout Springs community have mounted year after year about the lack of cellular service. Many have blamed town officials for having derailed the fire district’s tower — with political influence peddling a common theme — while supporting other tower proposals.

The commissioners brought an application to the Planning Board as instructed, choosing to pursue the taller, more stalwart tower design in hopes that linking the town’s emergency communications equipment to the project would help speed it along.

But town officials were still cold to the fire district’s proposal, noting that it would still be too close to many homes surrounding the firehouse. In 2021, the town itself proposed an alternative tower on town land just up the street from the firehouse, but was met with a wall of fury from neighbors of that property.

The Girl Scouts of Nassau County, who own Camp Blue Bay, were spurred by the tumult over the towers to welcome a new, 185-foot tower on their property.

Last month, a rally was held at the firehouse that focused on the dangers of nonexistent cellular service and championed the firehouse’s existing tower as a nearly immediate solution, with the implication that town officials could sidestep the legal hurdles and authorize the tower to be “turned on.”

“The public perception outside of Springs is that the town is dragging its feet and the Springs Fire District is ready to go, but the town is being an obstruction,” Katy Casey said at last weeks’ Springs CAC meeting.

But, Bolger noted, the application by the fire commissioners has languished for more than a year, awaiting an impact study by the fire district and Elite Towers.

Carl Irace, the attorney for the fire district, said the application has been stalled in part because of a delay in getting the specification needed for the town’s radio equipment and in part by pandemic-related issues.

He said that the district only learned last month that the town did not intend to even consider the fire district’s proposed new tower for its communications equipment.

Irace said the district has three primary goals that it had hoped a tower on its property would address: improved emergency communications, better cellular service in the community — so that residents can reach emergency dispatchers and so emergency responders can communicate with cellular-based equipment — and as a funding source to help fund professional EMTs to man district ambulances when volunteers cannot respond.

When the district first constructed the tower in 2015, the commissioners told community members that leasing space on the tower to cellular companies could net it $10,000 to $15,000 per month in lease fees.

Irace also said that federal statutes make it almost inevitable that the firehouse property will have a tower, of some sort — nodding to the fact that in two previous cellular tower applications that were denied by the town and answered with lawsuits by the cellular providers proposing them, the town had agreed to settlements that would allow the towers to be built, regardless of neighbors’ objections.

“Federal law designates telecommunications equipment as a utility and accordingly mandates that such infrastructure is not restricted by local laws, especially in underserved areas like Springs and other parts of our town,” Irace said. “The replacement tower application is strong and the need for service is clear, so by the end of the process, whether by town Planning Board or federal court order, there is going to be a new and improved tower at the firehouse that will benefit residents of the district.”