Editor’s note: This commentary is by Art Edelstein, who is a freelance journalist and author, and adjunct professor in the CORE at Champlain College. He is a member of the North Calais Neighborhood Coalition fighting the VTel Wi-Fi tower proposed for Bayne Comolli Road in East Calais.
[I]ssues concerning progress have long been debated in Vermont. Today they are playing themselves out on ridgelines, fields and forest as we grapple with new and helpful technologies and their place in a rural landscape.
Just such a debate is being had on a back road in Calais. Here on Bayne Comolli Road, which straddles the Woodbury town line, a group of landowners is fighting VTel, the Springfield telecommunications company that is bringing Wi-Fi to rural areas of the state, and we are fighting one landowner. They are in the process of putting up a Wi-Fi tower that will throw the very rural character of this road way out of whack.
The residents here are anything but Luddites. We have satellite TV, high speed Internet service, drive recent model SUVs, and read the morning news on our iPads. The issue isn’t technology and high speed connectivity, which all the residents already have access to. The issue is the placement of this tower significantly above a tree line that covers one- and two-story wood-framed homes in an area that is quintessential Vermont.
Should a single landowner and a telecommunications company that wants to up its bottom line be able to bludgeon a whole community of landowners who, on their own, do very little to alter the landscape and character of their neighborhood?
The residents of this road, and I am one of them, have been fighting this tower, now projected to rise 140 feet above the landscape, since the end of last year. What we find galling and frustrating is that one landowner, who will unilaterally receive considerable financial gain from the rental of his property for the tower placement, can, in essence, change the character of the landscape and inject a long-term alteration into the community. And his neighbors be damned!
The other aspect of this neighborhood frustration is how little we have in the way of fighting back. Right now several members of our local group NCNC (North Calais Neighbors Coalition) are spending their days reading through reams of regulations to understand how to meet the challenge this tower presents in a process that appears to favor VTel above all others.
Virtually no one around here wants this tower erected. VTel will make lots of money when it goes up, and the landowner will probably get his property taxes paid by the income he receives from the lease. The rest of us will have to swallow this affront to our neighborhood and the tower will remain a constant reminder of our powerlessness to fight corporate America.
What’s really the question here is how our society is going to deal with technological change that affects the landscape. We need solar power and wind energy. We need connectivity to high speed Internet. But should these powerful and 21st century mechanisms be inserted into a 19th to mid-20th century rural environment? Should a single landowner and a telecommunications company that wants to up its bottom line be able to bludgeon a whole community of landowners who, on their own, do very little to alter the landscape and character of their neighborhood?
Progress is important but so are the wishes of the majority. In this case, and in many others, it appears that profit supersedes the traditional look of the landscape. Without a more communal approach to placement of new technologies that don’t fit the natural character of their surroundings we are going to have a lot more fights over towers and solar panel and wind farms. This is the conundrum that faces our state. Let’s start thinking about this for the next legislative session.
