It's not easy to recreate the thinking that led us to this tower proposal and design.
The primary artifact is a draft feasibility study, dated October 22, 2010, (click on "Radio Communications Study" at http://norwich.vt.us/applications-reports-ordinances/). The report, conspicuously marked "DRAFT REPORT" on every page, inventories current emergency communications equipment and then concludes a tower sited at the Norwich DPW/Town Garage/Dump would provide better coverage than a similar transmitter currently operating from Hurricane Hill in Hartford. There's really not a lot more to it than that; try to read it through if you doubt me.
What's clear is this feasibility study never asks which site would best provide optimal emergency services communications in town. It never considered the most basic development guidelines imposed by Norwich zoning regulation restrictions on tower height or siting. It never mentions siting a tower on leased private land at all. Instead, it reads as though the engineer was simply asked to provide a feasibility study recommending a tower on the Norwich DPW site -- not whether it was the best choice or even a good one among all possible sites in town.
This conclusion-as-a-premise was then compounded by a series of arbitrary and unilateral decisions about the tower design:
- Because the Norwich DPW site lies in a valley, the tower itself needs to be as high as possible to broadcast over the intervening hills and ridges;
- FAA regulations require a flashing light on towers over 200 feet so it was decided, to avoid neighbor backlash, to restrict this tower to 198 feet, though that limits coverage;
- The Fire/Police station was considered a candidate to improve signal propagation up the valleys that feed into downtown, but it was concluded a 198 foot tower, even without a flashing light, would elicit too much opposition in the more densely populated downtown.
As a result, we have a proposal for a very tall tower sitting in a valley. No effort was made to evaluate possible sites on higher terrain where a smaller tower, as urged by our zoning regulations, might provide equivalent coverage or better.
Worse still, the feasibility study acknowledges, "Additional remote transmitter sites may be required to improve coverage in other areas of Town experiencing deficient coverage, such as the southwest portion of Norwich. Our recommendation is the system should be evaluated for realtime coverage (from the Norwich DPW and Hayes Hill in Hanover) prior to implement (sic) supplemental solutions."
In other words, until the Norwich DPW tower is up and running for a while, we won't know how well it works -- it's "realtime coverage" -- and so won't know whether additional towers may be needed to address "deficient coverage."
My efforts to persuade the Capital Facilities Committee, the Selectboard, and the Town Manager these past nine months to go back and do a proper, unrestricted, engineering study seeking the best site for a tower to serve the most people have all been rebuffed on our Town Manager's insistence that his own experience in this field tells him there is no such site. Ask to see the propagation studies that substantiate that opinion and you're redirected to the feasibility study that never asks at all.
How can this be when the very top of the proposed Norwich DPW tower will stand less than 950 feet above sea level while all the surrounding hills -- in fact 15,000 acres, more than half the town -- stands higher than 950 feet? If elevation doesn't matter to signal coverage, then the town should reduce the tower to 80' -- just 20' above the surrounding tree line as our zoning regulations request -- and go get their Development Review Board permit. But if elevation does matter to overall coverage why on earth build a tower in a narrow valley when your own feasibility study acknowledges doubts about coverage adequacy? This is a matter of public safety after all.
Why?
Because we're under time pressure to get a tower built before the FCC narrow-banding deadline strikes on January 1, 2013. The race to meet this deadline has placed expediency above all else. As a result, a series of arbitrary, unilateral decisions have been made that we, as taxpayers and townspeople, are expected to live with for the next 60 years. Decisions to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on long-term infrastructure the feasibility study itself acknowledged may require "supplemental solutions;" decisions to ignore local zoning regulation height restriction guidance as an avoidable inconvenience; to rebuff all inquiries whether other sites might prove a better long-term investment for the town; and, most recently, to give this half-baked tower site to VTel for sixty years in the name of thrift.
I want to emphasize here that I do not, for a moment, doubt our Town Manager's earnest and diligent belief he is doing the best he can to meet this FCC deadline. He's a highly intelligent man absolutely dedicated to meeting what he sees as a fundamental obligation to protect the community. Unfortunately, fixated on that deadline, his intransigence towards all efforts to broaden the scope of our tower investment has painted us all -- selectboard, town manager, townspeople, and now VTel -- into a corner with little time left and waning public support.
Ultimately, this tower proposal suffers from a hasty, ill-conceived foundation. It's time to stop shoring it up and recognize this controversy is undermining confidence in the architects.
There is still time to undertake an engineering study focused on siting and designing a tower to address our long-term telecommunications goals. A proper study will cure many of the missteps already made and help restore public confidence that this is a shared effort to solve our narrow-banding challenge, avoiding another futile bond vote such as we had this week.
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