Construction of a 100-foot cellphone tower behind Sagaponack Village Hall has begun, but residents of the tiny village continued to oppose it at an Oct. 16 meeting of the village board.
The board has “failed” in its “duties to all of the residents of the village” by allowing the construction to take place, said a Sag Harbor-based attorney, Alex Kriegsman, who is representing the opponents. “It’s not too late to do the right thing,” he told the board.
If construction were abandoned, “What would the cost to the village be?” asked Marilee Foster, who has been an outspoken critic of the tower as an affront to the historic character of the village.
“I don’t see where this village is going to end up in a fruitless lawsuit,” Mayor Bill Tillotson replied. Sagaponack has already agreed to a 55-year lease with Homeland Towers, he explained, and should the company, for any reason, sue, the village could be liable for all the revenue Homeland would have received for the duration of the lease.
The mayor pointed to a 2015 plan in Springs to place a cellphone tower near St. Peter’s Chapel on Old Stone Road. East Hampton Town tried to fight the construction, Mr. Tillotson recalled, and years of costly litigation ensued before the tower was finally built.
Karina Forrest, another vocal opponent of the Sagaponack tower, objected to the process by which the board accepted it. Ms. Forrest operates Loaves and Fishes, which is just across Sagg Main Street from the construction site. “I don’t understand why this didn’t have a public hearing. I’ve lost a lot of sleep, a lot of feelings of safety,” Ms. Forrest said. “I really wish there was another way,” she added later.
“State and village law lays out when you need a public hearing,” Brian Egan, the village attorney, replied. In this case, he said, the law mandated a “public meeting” — the board did hold several — but not a public “hearing.” In addition, the board emailed reminders about the meetings to the 600 email addresses collected from Sagaponack residents. (The population of Sagaponack was 770 at the time of the 2020 census.)
Ms. Foster had put fliers in mailboxes around the village, urging residents to attend last week’s meeting. “You, the residents of Sagaponack, make a difference as to whether this tower goes up or not,” the flier begins. It goes on to mention reports from The Wall Street Journal and CBS News stating that iPhones with an iOS 18 update can connect to emergency services without cellphone service.
“There is no need for a cell tower to be installed for emergency service purposes at this point in our amazing technological era,” the flier says. (In the past, the village board has argued that reliable cellphone service is necessary for ambulances and other emergency services, which often pass through Sagaponack on the way to Stony Brook Southampton Hospital.)
In the flier, Ms. Forrest notes that the cellphone tower will be 650 feet away from Loaves and Fishes, which “places us directly in the line of fire of harmful radiation that has been proven to increase cancer.”Below,she listsstudiesthat drew a similar conclusion, including one from 2004 conducted in Germany and another from 2011 conducted in Brazil.
The village board has argued in the past that federal law prohibits a local government from making decisions based on concerns about radiation, and has posted, at the entrance to Village Hall, a study from the American Cancer Society that found “little evidence” that cellphone towers cause cancer. “There’s going to be a tower here,” Mayor Tillotson stated toward the end of the meeting. “It’s going to happen.”
