Editor’s note: This article is by John Lippman of the Valley News, in which it was first published Aug. 2, 2015.
[T]he backbone of VTel’s high-speed wireless broadband system in Vermont is a network of 135 antenna sites around the state that allow users to connect with the Internet with a technology similar to that used for smartphones.
The antenna structures are commonly referred to as “towers,” although in many cases the antenna equipment is placed on telephone poles, inside church steeples, atop town halls and even granaries or on pre-existing cell towers.
Now, five years since it received stimulus funding, VTel is nearly finished building its network of telecom towers across the state. In several towns, however, the introduction of transmission sites has been bitterly contested by residents who object to what they assert are unsightly structures marring the landscape and VTel’s backhanded treatment of local concerns.
But there’s not much towns can do because under state law, when it comes to telecommunications providers placing and building of towers around the state, local municipalities have virtually no authority over the matter.
That was evident in the case of Hartford, for example, where the Selectboard and Planning Commission both opposed, unsuccessfully, VTel’s efforts to build a 90-foot tower on Fairbanks Turn in Quechee as residents complained about the effect it would have on property values even though the ultimate say about the tower lay outside the town’s authority.
On rare occasions, VTel would drop a tower site plan or switch tactics in the face of stiff local opposition.
In Plainfield, Vt., VTel withdrew its tower site proposal last year to avoid the cost of litigation after the Selectboard said it would not be in compliance with the town plan. In Newfane, VTel wanted to build a 150-foot tower at the Windham County Sheriff’s office in Newfane Village, but was forced to back off after residents complained it was incongruous with the historic village and a village trustee said commercial activity on county-owned property was prohibited. Voters in Norwich rejected a proposal from town officials to accept an offer from VTel to finance construction of a telecom tower on New Boston Road on which the town could place emergency communications equipment. (VTel later quietly placed antenna equipment on top of a telephone pole near the road leading to the entrance of the Montshire Museum).
One community aggressively trying to block VTel’s erection of a tower is Cabot, a town of 1,433 in Washington County, about 21 miles west of St. Johnsbury. VTel is seeking to build a 90-foot telecommunications tower on Thistle Hill Road on a spot which the town says is only 31 feet from the road and poses a danger to motorists if it fell during a storm.
Cabot resident R.D. Eno, whose property abuts the site of the proposed tower location, said “it would be clearly visible from my front door” and is an inappropriate structure for a “rural residential neighborhood.” He and the town have moved to intervene with the state Public Service Board to hold a public hearing to contest VTel’s efforts to build the tower.
“VTel has failed to make any effort to adhere to the town’s plan,” said Jack Daniels, chairman of the Cabot Selectboard. Daniels said the town hired a consulting engineer who believes VTel’s transmission site can be as effective on a nearby farm silo that currently hosts a cellphone antenna for AT&T.
Typically, all VTel requires to build a transmission tower in a community is a certificate of public good granted by Vermont’s Public Service Board. That’s because VTel, like solar-power companies seeking to build solar array sites for energy generation, is allowed to avail itself of the state’s 248(a) statute that permits utilities to bypass local zoning authorities.
The law was passed by the Vermont Legislature at the urging of Gov. Peter Shumlin to streamline and expedite the approval process by which telecom and solar power companies can erect infrastructure in local communities, said Dan Richardson, an attorney representing the town of Cabot in its fight against VTel and instructor in municipal law at Vermont Law School.
The statute “basically pre-empts” local zoning ordinances, Richardson said, allowing the petitioner to bypass local regulations. “They have to give some ‘due consideration’ of local zoning laws but (the law) doesn’t require them to fulfill zoning requirements,” he said.
And it’s the lack of local autonomy over where telecom providers can erect towers that so infuriates residents in some towns who contend VTel has at times ignored community standards despite the objections of those who live there.
In Calais, a town of 1,600 in Washington County about 13 miles northeast of Montpelier and 21 miles southwest of Cabot, VTel wants to build a 140-foot tower that is being contested by the town. Residents say the proposed location would disfigure the area’s natural beauty, which encompass a pond where loons nest, and disregards documented evidence it is a historic site once occupied by Native Americans.
“We’re not against modernization,” said Denise Wheeler, chairwoman of the Calais Selectboard. But VTel’s “plan doesn’t comply with the town plan. They don’t care and they should care.”
VTel, in seeking to dismiss the town’s complaint to the Public Service Board, replied in a filing that there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate the town’s claims the proposed tower location would occupy a historic site and contends other claims that the project would exceed the scope allowed under the law are factually incorrect.
How Many Towers?
As VTel built out its wireless broadband system across the state, it required more transmission sites than initially planned. The number of reported antenna sites shifted over time, sometimes rising, sometimes falling.
VTel said in its 2010 application for stimulus funding to the Rural Utilities Service that its proposed wireless broadband system called for building “119 wireless towers.”
Three years later, in 2013, Diane Guite, the daughter of VTel president Michel Guite who was overseeing the wireless broadband project at the time, told the Montpelier-based online news service VTDigger that 180 sites would be installed by the end of 2013, representing 80 percent of the project’s completion, with 40 more sites to follow afterward.
In a May 2013 news release announcing it had received a $2.6 million grant from the Vermont Telecommunications Authority for infrastructure expansion, VTel said it was “deploying more than 200 wireless sites” across the state.
Then, in April 2014, when VTel held a demonstration of its wireless broadband system for the public, the company said it expected to have 180 sites covering 95 percent of Vermont households by the summer.
Finally, in an email to the Valley News last week , Michel Guite said the wireless broadband project “is in final construction phase” and had 135 transmission sites.
Vermont’s Department of Public Service reports that as of June 2015, the Public Service Board had granted 126 certificates of public good for the erection of antenna sites. Not all sites, however, require a certificate of public good.
For example, if VTel wants to place antenna equipment on a pre-existing tower owned by another company, such as Verizon or AT&T, only an agreement with the tower owner is required and no certificate of public good is necessary, Richardson said.
It costs VTel an average of $40,000 in permitting fees per site, according to a memo from Diane Guite to state telecom officials in January 2014 when pressing its case why the 248(a) statute, which requires renewal by the Legislature, should be extended.
She wrote that VTel Wireless believed the state law “has been and will continue to be critical to the company’s success in building a statewide 4G wireless network. … Without extension of 248(a), VTel’s progress in bringing high-speed Internet to unserved areas could be slowed significantly and — while acknowledging that the VTel Wireless build has taken longer than expected — the company respectfully requests that this legislation be extended through the end of 2014.”
In May 2014, the Legislature passed extended the measure until 2017, when it is scheduled to expire.
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.
