"Make no mistake, East Hampton Town Board, we will not take this sitting down," Jacki Esposito said on Monday evening, as around 50 of her Springs neighbors murmured in agreement. "We are here and we are going to continue to fight this."
The setting was the backyard of a Crandall Street house, where a campaign to thwart the town board's proposal to site a 185-foot monopole for emergency and wireless communications equipment in an adjacent wooded area was gathering strength. The site, used long ago for mining and sometimes referred to as "the Pit," is today commonly used as a park by people in the neighborhood.
Several of those in attendance or listening via telephone, lamenting the potential loss of a place where neighborhood children could "just be kids," as one put it, had pleaded with the town board at its work session last week to find an alternate location for the tower that the town's communications director had proposed on the 6.9-acre wooded area bounded by Crandall Street, Lincoln Avenue, Norfolk Street, and Fort Pond Boulevard.
Springs is "the last major hole" in the recently upgraded emergency communications infrastructure, Ed Schnell, the communications director, told the board last week. The plan calls for a 100-foot "cell on wheels," telecommunications equipment mounted on a truck, to provide emergency communications and cellular equipment on a temporary basis while a permanent, 185-foot monopole is designed and constructed. According to the board, a 100-foot-by-100-foot area of the wooded area would accommodate the monopole and ancillary structures and equipment, and an access road to the site would be constructed.
"We know that there are alternative sites," said Ms. Esposito, an attorney who criticized the board last week for failing to notify adjacent property owners in advance of the proposal's unveiling and worried aloud about the effect of radiation emanating from the monopole. "The town said those sites won't work. We would like the town to investigate that further. We are not convinced that those alternative sites don't work."
The board discussed those potential alternatives last week, stating that, for various reasons, none were suitable. The town had negotiated with the Girl Scouts of Nassau County for a 150-foot tower at the Camp Blue Bay sleepaway camp, on Flaggy Hole Road, but "the landlord decided they didn't want that high a tower because of fall zone issues" and areas on the site that they wanted to preserve for future camp uses, Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said. The plan was abandoned.
To be effective, the tower must be situated in northern-central Springs, Eric Schantz, the town's director of planning, told the board last week. The Accabonac Solar plant, owned by the town, is too far south, he told the board. The same is true of the town's recycling center on Springs-Fireplace Road, the board was told. Springs School District officials had objected to a tower on school grounds "for a number of reasons," Mr. Van Scoyoc had said. There are "very, very few properties within that area of Springs" that would provide the needed coverage and meet town-code-required setbacks and a fall zone to protect against debris falling from a tower, or, worse, a fallen tower, he said.
A 150-foot-tall tower at the Springs Firehouse, built in 2015 without site plan approval from the planning board, had its building permit revoked by the town's zoning board of appeals, and a State Supreme Court judge dismissed a lawsuit the fire district filed against the Z.B.A. challenging that decision. While several residents asked that it be used temporarily to site cellphone antennas, that, too, is off-limits, Mr. Van Scoyoc said last week, as it was deemed illegal and it is to be taken down.Ê
A nearby resident had objected to the tower at that site because "there are homes within that fall zone," Ms. Esposito said on Monday. "Well, there are homes in the fall zone here, too, and those residents' lives matter, too." Members of the board, she said, "don't really seem to want to hear our concerns."
At last week's meeting, Margaret Garsetti had begged the board not to site the monopole in the wooded area near her house, citing the potential health hazards of radiation emanating from it, depreciation of property values, and the loss of green space. On Tuesday, she said that the plan to site a 185-foot monopole "in a middle-class neighborhood that has a strong immigrant community" was "outrageous."
Gina Bradley lamented "so much destruction of trees and natural flora and fauna, not to mention the fact that my son loves that pit on a snowy day." Residents, she said, "need to make sure we stress the environmental impact" that a monopole in the wooded area would have "on our water and our vegetation."
The discussion spilled into Tuesday's virtual meeting of the Springs Citizens Advisory Committee, where Councilwoman Kathee Burke-Gonzalez, the town board's liaison to the committee, faced sharp questions and accusations that the board was rushing the process without proper review. In an unusual turn, Councilman Jeff Bragman conducted a sort of cross examination of his colleague on the board, labeling her knowledge of the proposed project "scanty." The problem of the town's emergency communications system is "the slowest burning crisis in town," he said. The "so-called urgency," he said, is the election that is barely three months away. Ms. Burke-Gonzalez is up for re-election this year, and Mr. Bragman, whose terms expires at year's end, is challenging Mr. Van Scoyoc for the supervisor's position.
Earlier in the meeting, Daniel Aharoni, president of the Clearwater Beach Property Owners Association, voiced his support for the plan to erect the monopole at the Crandall Street location, citing the need for wireless and emergency communication. The association represents 868 properties, he said. Mr. Bragman referred to that statement, charging that the board is "counting votes" and conflating the issues of personal wireless and emergency communications, which he called "a masquerade to combine it into the issue of an emergency radio tower. . . . This is an artificially induced imminent crisis," he said.
Those attending Monday's meeting were asked to sign a petition opposing the board's plan, and the group plans to attend the board's meeting on Tuesday to continue its campaign to see the tower sited elsewhere. "I feel like, together we have a chance of actually fighting this back," Ms. Esposito said.
