Residents close to the Springs Fire Department may notice something odd in the skies on April 21. A balloon, three feet in diameter, hovering exactly 150 feet above the location of a proposed communications tower behind the firehouse. While there’s already a 150-foot-tall tower on the 2.7-acre property, the fire department plans to relocate it.
The “balloon test” is part of the fire department’s application for the tower that is now being reviewed by the East Hampton Town Planning Board and it will allow people to assess the visual impact of the proposed tower from many vantage points. The balloon will be afloat for four hours. If it’s too windy that day, it will rise instead on April 23.
The board had previously indicated its support for the relocation at an April 2023 meeting, but the application has yet to be approved or to go through the public hearing process. On March 13, the East Hampton Town Planning Department sent Elite Towers, the contractor, a letter stating that the application is still incomplete, pending mostly minor additions, the visual impact study chief among them.
The application requires no variances and the tower’s new location will remove it from the “fall-zone area” that has been of concern to neighbors.
However, it is still close to scenic, historic, and residential areas.
“These visualizations are going to be extremely important,” Ed Krug, the planning board chairman, said at the board’s April 2 meeting. “One thing to be clear about, too, is how the equipment gets mounted onto the monopole. There have been other situations where we thought it was just a monopole and suddenly there are all sorts of appendages and whatnot at the top of the thing, which completely changes its visual impact. We don’t want a bait-and-switch here.”
A lawyer for Elite Towers, Greg Alvarez, assured him there would be no bait-and-switch.
“Your Verizon, your T-Mobile, your AT&Ts, and your Dish, they’re all going to be inside the pole,” he said.
The Springs Fire Department also plans to mount emergency equipment on top: whip antennas, which were described as thin pole-like structures, 6 to 12 feet long.
Elite Towers proposed taking photos from six areas for visual simulations that could be presented at an eventual public hearing, but Tina Vavilis LaGarenne, the director of the town’s Planning Department, suggested more. She told the board she wanted to make sure people in residential areas to the north and west of the site understood the visual impact, and that people could also see what the impact would be from a recreational area along Gerard Drive, to the east, and from the center of the Springs Historic District.
The board agreed that additional vantage points were necessary.
The application has a rich history, now well over 10 years old. Here is a very short summary: In 2014, the fire department received a building permit for the current pole, which it erected before the permit was revoked a year later by the town zoning board of appeals. The fire department sued the Z.B.A. and lost. In the meantime, it submitted a second application for a taller pole, which would include emergency equipment. The planning board decided it would require a lengthy environmental review, and it was never built.
All the while, the town moved forward on locating emergency equipment on a 185-foot pole at Camp Blue Bay, which was approved in the fall of 2022, obviating the need for the fire department’s taller pole.
A wireless code change, enacted in 2022, that removed a fall zone requirement, and the fire department’s withdrawal of its application for the taller tower, paved the way for the application that the planning board now seems close to approving.
The March 13 letter also addressed two other, relatively minor points: the screening of the pole’s equipment area, and the loss of up to four fire department parking spots.
“Usually we do a green mesh type of finish,” Mr. Alvarez told the board. “It’s kind of smack dab in the middle of the property.”
“They do have picnic tables, and they have family events at the firehouse,” said Reed Jones, one of the newer members of the planning board. “I think you guys have got to do it nicely. I don’t think it needs to be fancy, but I think some basic landscaping.”
“This has been a contentious application in the past,” Louis Cortese, a planning board member, said. “We’re down to the visual aspect of this pole and how it affects the surrounding areas. Our decision is based solely on that one issue.”
“I’ve been around for most of the history of this project,” Mr. Krug said. “There’s been lots of bad feeling and perhaps bad advice. I’m happy we’re arriving at a place where we’re very near a solution.”
Once the visual renderings and landscaping plans are submitted to the board and the application is deemed complete, a public hearing will be held. But first, that balloon.
