New Springs Fire Department Tower Casts Shadow

A 150-foot cellular communications pole erected several weeks ago behind the Springs Fire Department building on Fort Pond Boulevard has angered neighbors, who say they were not told about it. According to Patrick Glennon, the Springs Fire District’s chief commissioner, its purpose is to enhance radio and pager communications for fire and ambulance personnel.

Volunteer firefighters and ambulance personnel living in remote areas of the hamlet such as Clearwater “literally have to put their pagers up in the window” to receive transmissions calling them to emergencies, Mr. Glennon said. And, he said, their two-way radios, a type also used by East Hampton Town police, drop out in some parts of Springs.

Residents in the vicinity of Talmage Farm Lane, which abuts the fire district property to the north, were taken aback to see the pole go up without any notice to the community, said David N. Kelley, a spokesman, in a letter to the editor last week — especially after a discussion nine years ago, when the district first proposed a communications tower, ended inconclusively in the face of residents’ concerns.

Mr. Kelley said this week that he and others had asked for information from the fire commissioners but had not heard back. 

“Aside from potential health risks, the tower now casts a shadow over one of the most pristine and authentically rural areas of the East End,” and is visible from across Accabonac Harbor, he wrote in his letter. 

The fire district’s original proposal for an antenna tower was described as a money-making venture, through renting space to cellphone companies, Mr. Kelley said in an email this week. If the goal this time is for enhanced emergency telecommunications, he said, residents would like to know “what assessments of the emergency telecommunications were undertaken and what alternatives were considered.”

“Communications have been getting worse and worse,” said Mr. Glennon, who has served as a fire district commissioner for a decade. “Nine years ago, we still sort of had a decent system.” Since then, he said, the technology and its requirements have changed.

“When I’m in the back of the ambulance and I’m on my way to the hospital with someone who’s having a heart attack, and now I try to get onto the radio and contact medical control, and I can’t, my next option is my cellphone,” he said. “And that doesn’t work because you’re in a big aluminum box, when minutes can mean the difference between life and death.” 

The new pole could also accommodate equipment for the town police communications system, he said, and for the county’s fire, rescue, and emergency services system.

Residents have expressed concern about the safety of those who live within the pole’s fall zone. Mr. Glennon said it was designed to a standard of wind resistance and that as a single pole about five feet in diameter it was unlikely to be affected by high winds. Also, he said, it is designed so that should it begin to tilt, “it will crumple within itself” when it reaches a certain angle.

The tower was paid for and is owned by a company called Elite Towers. The company has the option, Mr. Glennon said, of leasing space on the antenna to cellphone service providers, and would retain rental fees. “We didn’t put it up for revenue. It’s first and foremost a communications tower. We put it up to enhance our communications.”

Besides immediate improvements, said the commissioner, better communications capability could allow the fire district, at some point in the future, to discontinue its contract with East Hampton Village dispatchers, who coordinate emergency calls for Springs and other fire districts, and move instead to a free Suffolk County dispatching system, which requires the enhanced technology. The Springs district pays more than $130,000 a year for the village service, Mr. Glennon said. 

Neighborhood aesthetics, he noted, were taken into account. “It’s not going to look like [the tower] that’s sitting behind Town Hall. This is simply a pole.”

Should Elite Towers allow cell carriers to attach equipment to the pole, he said it would likely be three or four fiberglass whip antennas fastened to a crossbar at the top.

The pole, Mr. Kelley wrote in his letter last week, “is in the middle of a very densely inhabited neighborhood, and casts a long shadow over the protected Springs Historic District and the farmland that remains from the Bonackers who first settled in Springs 300 years ago,” as well as the harbor area, which has been deemed a “scenic area of statewide significance.”

The fire district is exempt from town zoning laws, and so did not need site-plan approval from the planning board for the pole. A building permit was obtained. 

 Mr. Kelley, who is an attorney, questioned whether the exemption would stand if the tower is leased to private entities, and asserted that several zoning laws, if applicable, had been violated. 

“We think it is incumbent upon the district to invite the input of the community it is sworn to protect — as it did in 2006,” he stated in his letter.