A new petition started by a group calling itself Springs Residents Against Elite Towers seeks to stop a long-planned cell tower at the Springs Fire Department on Fort Pond Boulevard.
In 2019, another petition opposing the tower gained over 1,000 signatures. As The Star went to print, this one had just over 50.
A public hearing about the tower has been scheduled before the East Hampton Town Planning Board on Jan. 14.
That same board said the tower would not need an extensive environmental review per New York State’s Environmental Quality Review Act, despite requiring one for an earlier application on the property. The town’s architectural review board, in August, also got out of the way of the project, offering little criticism about the tower’s visual impact.
Perhaps, with its petition, Springs Residents Against Elite Towers is trying to catch a little of the same lightning in a bottle that helped derail another recent project after an outpouring of neighbor opposition: the 79 condominiums for property on Three Mile Harbor Road.
It’s been over a decade since the Fire Department first applied for a building permit to erect a 150-foot tower aimed initially at bolstering the town’s emergency radio network.
The original building permit was revoked by the town’s zoning board of appeals, and while never operational, the tower has remained, close to the Fire Department property line, looming over a residential neighborhood.
The current proposal is to remove the old tower and build a new one in the center of the property that will primarily serve personal wireless carriers, like Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile.
(DISH Network was originally mentioned as a tower tenant, but AT&T bought its wireless spectrum in August.)
The Fire Department sued the town over the revoked permit and lost. The town changed its wireless code and a 185-foot-tall tower at Camp Blue Bay went up in the spring of 2023, which allowed for a major rehaul of the town’s emergency communications network. That tower is less than a mile and a half from the firehouse.
A smaller 70-foot tower at St. Peter’s Chapel, on Old Stone Highway in Springs, which will house only AT&T equipment, is largely complete. A final inspection by the town, which has been requested, will give it a certificate of occupancy and the ability to transmit.
The Fire Department has its own emergency equipment that it will be placing on the pole on its property, but at an April planning board meeting, it wasn’t clear how the antennas would mesh with the existing townwide network, or what they would look like exactly.
The firehouse is also within view of the Springs Historic District, and a new tower will be visible from parts of Gerard Drive.
“We need to be completely transparent about the potential visual impacts,” Ed Krug, the board’s chairman, said at the April meeting.
With all the new “macro tower” coverage coming into the area, Robert Berg, an attorney representing Springs Residents Against Elite Towers, says the need for the new tower has been removed.
Further, just six months ago, the town agreed to install nearly 200 “small cell” towers across the township, with 150 meant for Springs and Northwest Woods. Mr. Berg says their existence would add even more redundancy.
“To say there’s a widespread coverage gap in Springs at this point, it’s just not true,” he said in a recent phone call.
At the Dec. 16 Springs Citizens Advisory Committee meeting, David Buda, a committee member, said he went through the 1,400-page application document on the town’s website and could not find propagation maps from the various carriers that would show the impact of all the new and proposed towers, macro and micro alike.
At that meeting, Tanya Negron, a real estate broker and managing partner at Elite Towers, said her company had recently broadcast frequencies from a crane at the Fire Department to show how coverage will improve. However, that data has not yet been made public.
“They should delay the public hearing,” said Mr. Berg. “The planning board was ready to hold a hearing on an unsubstantiated application. To dump a study at the last second is outrageous.”
Apart from that, Mr. Berg doesn’t feel the application should even be considered since the Fire Department never removed the old tower.
“For five years they’ve had a judicially acknowledged illegal structure. The town is not even supposed to consider a new application until the illegal structure is removed,” he said. “This has been an illegal, dangerous structure for five years. Why didn’t the town abate its existence? Something smells.”
One last point of contention with the application was about the “fall zone.” When the Fire Department first applied, the town required a fall zone twice the height of the tower. When the wireless code was updated, that was reduced to the height of the tower. Placing the tower in the center of the property meets the current fall zone regulations.
Still, multiple times the attorney for Elite Towers, Greg Alvarez, told the planning board that in a disaster, the pole would telescope into itself. Reed Jones, a board member, used that logic as part of his support for the project.
“I’ve been told that the fall zone really doesn’t matter, because these poles are designed in such a way that in a disaster, they’d crumple upon themselves,” he said in July.
Ms. Negron seemed to contradict that idea at the recent Springs Citizens Advisory Committee meeting. “If you have the antennas that are attached, and you have all the cable and co-ax going on the inside, there is no ability for it to fall into itself because it’s filled.”
