Commission Seeks Feedback On Cell Tower Proposal

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New Canaan residents are invited to public hearing to be held at 7:30 p.m. Monday at Town Hall to share their views on a proposal from the Utilities Commission to install 110-foot tall cellular towers at Irwin Park and West School.

For the past several years the Utilities Commission, under the direction of the Board of Selectmen, has been studying various approaches to improving wireless coverage in town. The northern sections of New Canaan, in particular the northwest quadrant, suffer from serious wireless coverage gaps—some as large as 10 square miles—due to the town’s unique topography. Not only is this an inconvenience for residents, it also presents a serious public safety risk, as the town’s police, fire and EMS services all rely on cellular technology for emergency communications.

During Thursday’s Town Council meeting, Police Chief Leon Krolikowski said “there have been incidents in the past where people have tried to make 911 calls from the north section of town and have not been able to get through.” He said a few months ago, a tradesman who was working in the northwest corner of town seriously injured his leg and almost bled to death because he was unable to reach 911 using his cell phone.

“There have also been incidents of motor vehicle accidents where people couldn’t get through,” Krolikowski told the council members, adding that people who have been in accidents have sometimes had to “drive toward town until they get a signal.”

Wendy Dixon Fog, captain of New Canaan EMS, added that emergency medical technicians rely on the cellular network to get data and information about patients while they are on scene or in transit. She said when cell signals drop, information on things like patient allergies can’t be readily transmitted to the field, which, in turn, endangers lives.

“We can’t keep kicking this can down the road—someone is going to die,” Fog told the councilmen. “We have dodged a bullet a number of times.”

Making the emergency communications problem all the more dire is the fact that Aquarion recently told the four carriers that have their antennae mounted on the main water tower at Waveny Park that they must remove those antenna within the next two years. This means the town will likely need to work with an infrastructure company to construct a new cell site near where the water tower is located.

In addition, New Canaan recently withdrew an application to install an emergency communications antenna tower near the Laurel Reservoir in Stamford, due to objections from neighbors. So, how to solve for the coverge gaps up north remains a very challenging problem.

One thing for certain: Just because the town’s emergency services need better wireless coverage does not necessarily mean town residents are OK with 110-foot cellular towers blemishing their horizons.

Basically, New Canaan is trying to control its destiny with regard to how cellular technology is deployed in town by proactively developing its own criteria for what’s allowed and what isn’t, so that it isn’t left up to the carriers to decide. The hope is that by getting regulations on the books that dictate where cell towers can be built and how tall they can be, the town can avoid having large, unsightly towers erected in the wrong places. Without rules and guidelines codified on the books, the town risks having the state Siting Council and the carriers dictate the specifications for it’s next cellular project.

That’s where the Utilities Commission comes in—its job is to identify coverage gaps and explore technology solutions that have the least impact in terms of aesthetics. As such, the commission must balance the need for better cellular service with the desire to maintain New Canaan’s small town charm.

During Thursday’s Town Council meeting, numerous residents who live near Irwin Park and West School used the comment period at the beginning of the meeting to express their objections to the commission’s proposal. Perhaps no one was more critical of the Utilities Commission’s work than Dan Radman, an Irwin Park neighbor and member of the Planning & Zoning Commission who said he was frustrated that the Utilities Commission had moved ahead with a request for proposal (RFP) for the tower projects without first getting P&Z to develop a general set of regulations pertaining to the construction of cell towers. Currently, there is a set of proposed regulations for P&Z to adopt, however, the commission has not had time to review, adjust and approve those proposed regulations.

“We need regulations in place on the Planning & Zoning side to help steer the deployment and design of these things,” Radman said, adding that currently New Canaan has “no hard guidelines” for the development of cellular towers.

“[It’s been a year] since the commission started developing this plan, and we’re just now discussing possible amendments to the zoning regulations,” Radman added. “It’s the cart before the horse—[the Utilities Commission] should have been before us a year ago with this. Then we would have come up with regulations that would have dictated that RFP. This way we don’t go out to the street with something that we don’t want.”

It should be emphasized that the Utilities Commission’s plan, however, is only in the preliminary stages. Furthermore, even if the plan were approved tomorrow “as is,” there’s still no saying whether a carrier will want to bring a tower to Irwin Park or West School. So it appears unlikely that anything will happen soon.

Tom Tesluk, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, gave an overview of the group’s proposal during the Town Council meeting. He said ever since site plans for the proposed towers went up on the town’s website, “there’s been a lot of talk… and some people are concerned that when this process was done that it was a fait accompli.”

“I can assure you that it is not—this is a process that continues to unfold—and the plans that are there are only a first cut,” Tesluk said.

Tesluk showed maps of the wireless coverage in town showing the dead areas as well as how the proposed towers would fill in some of those gaps. Most of the additional coverage would be on the west side of town, however, it would not completely extend upward into the northern section, where it is needed, leaving some council members to question whether it was prudent to install towers only to gain partial coverage.

“We all know that New Canaan has some serious [wireless] coverage problems – primarily on the north side of town,” Tesluk said, adding that the most recent cell tower to come online in town is the one located on the Silver Hill property—a project that had been 15 years in the making.

Tesluk pointed out that the maps he was showing did not include the additional coverage coming from the new cell tower going up at the Norwalk Armory site, which will provide some coverage on the east side of town.

“Back in 2013, the commission looked at the site at the transfer station, where AT&T was proposing a tower, and decided that additional coverage was not necessary because the impact of the Armory tower was not known,” he said. “It seemed clear to us then, as it is now, that a 180 foot tower with external arrays was not going to be appropriate anywhere in the town.”

Tesluk said one of the problems with the cell tower that had been proposed for the transfer station was that it was clearly “intended to benefit people outside of New Canaan – particularly Norwalk and particularly the traffic on the Merritt Parkway.”

He pointed out that during the time the Silver Hill site was being considered, “four other sites were proposed, and they were either rejected by the town or they were withdrawn by the carriers for one reason or another.”

“Throughout all of this, the town has tended to play a reactive role or even a passive role—which is to say that the town did not have a really clear idea internally of what it wanted to see—what was acceptable or not acceptable,” Tesluk said. “As a result, it just depended on data that was delivered by carriers or by infrastructure developers, which justified their own particular interests.”

Tesluk said when it comes to the process of improving wireless communications, there’s usually three main parties involved: The town, the carriers and the residents.

“For the town, improved cellular coverage is a matter of public safety,” he said. “The carriers, of course, are interested in making money—they want to have more cell towers to capture more traffic.

“The residents probably also want better cell coverage – but do not want to do it by putting large towers in their neighborhoods,” he added.

Tesluk said the commission’s recommendation is that the town “put itself into the position of being the landlord for these sites.”

“By being the landlord, the town can be in the position of deciding what is acceptable and what’s not acceptable in terms of designs and exact placement,” he said. “We want to put the town in best position to have maximum control. That doesn’t mean unilateral control. That’s not the same thing as saying, ‘You do it our way or you don’t do it at all.’ But it means that the town has a voice and can make an impact on what can get built.”

For infrastructure, the commission’s recommendation is that the town go with two to three concealed macro cell sites—these are towers that can be concealed in variety of ways so as to minimize their impact. One type is called a “monopine” and from a distance it looks just like a pine tree.

The commission recommends filling in the remain coverage gaps in town using a mix of microcell sites and distributed antenna systems (DAS). However, Tesluk noted that the option of using microcell sites and DAS is more expensive because it would involve the installation of 350 to 600 smaller poles along roads and rights of way and would also involve linking all of those antenna via fiber optic cabling, which would likely need to be buried.

One of the general problems the town faces in developing its own infrastructure plan is that it lacks sites in the north section of town that would be suitable for a tower.

“If you go further north of Parade Hill or up West, there isn’t any significant municipal property up there,” Tesluk said.

Last August, it was announced that the Utilities Commission had retained consultancy Homeland Towers to draw up plans for bringing in more cellular coverage in town. The company, as its main service, “performs a full assessment of the state of wireless communications in any municipality through the measurement of existing wireless coverage, and performs an in-depth qualification process to identify objectively good candidates for the placement of wireless communications facilities.”

The commission also hired the firm Cityscape to measure and record the radio signal topography for the town. That basically identified the dead spots and where coverage was needed.

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