Scott Olson, an attorney from Young/Sommer LLC, and representing Verizon, presenting plans for a proposed cell phone tower in Valatie during a joint meeting of the Village Board of Trustees and Planning Board on Wednesday night.
Scott Olson, an attorney from Young/Sommer LLC, and representing Verizon, presenting plans for a proposed cell phone tower in Valatie during a joint meeting of the Village Board of Trustees and Planning Board on Wednesday night.
VALATIE — Verizon Wireless presented a plan for a 125-foot cell phone tower in the village during a joint meeting of the village Planning Board and Village Board of Trustees on Wednesday night.
The proposed cell phone tower would be located behind the village’s office building at 3211 Church St., on property owned by the municipality. The 125-foot tower would provide cell phone service from Verizon Wireless to all of the village and some parts of the surrounding areas.
Ground-level equipment for the tower, and the tower itself, will be located in a 40-by-61-foot fenced area. The ground level equipment will include a GPS unit, an equipment cabinet, and concrete equipment pad, according to a presentation submitted to the village Planning Board.
The proposed 125-foot tower will provide 2,100 megahertz of cellphone coverage within the village and the surrounding area, an increase from the existing 700 megahertz of coverage, and will be made out of galvanized steel.
“Walk down Main Street, pull your phone out, if you have Verizon Wireless then you don’t need to see the graphs,” Scott Olson, an attorney representing Verizon from Young/Sommer LLC, said during the meeting. “We’re here, we’re trying to get service to this area.”
The company is also proposing cellphone towers elsewhere in Columbia County, including the towns of Stuyvesant and Austerlitz, Olson said.
“This area has been somewhat neglected, and we’re trying to fix that,” he said.
According to the 2024 annual report from CTIA, the organization that represents the wireless communications industry in the United States, over 558 million wireless connections, which include cell phones, laptops and tablets, occurred in the country, amounting to 1.6 connections for every person in the United States.
“Wireless is just expanding beyond anyone’s ability to keep up with what we’re doing,” Olson said. “We’re just struggling to stay above the water.”
The cell tower would also be emitting radiofrequency radiation below the federal regulations, Olson said.
“We’re under the 1 percent of the maximum that we have a right to basically emit,” he said.
The Federal Communications Commission sets a limit on human exposure to radiofrequency from cell phone towers to 580 microwatts per centimeter, which, according to the FCC, is greater than the amount of radiofrequency emitted at the base of cell phone towers.
“A lot of people, especially through the public hearing, are going to say ‘are these safe?,’” Olson said. “The answer is unequivocally yes.”
Olson added the village Planning Board cannot use potential health effects as a reason to deny an application for a cell phone tower.
“At the public hearing, you will have people stand up and say, the internet says there are health effects, and there’s cancer, and there’s this, and there’s that,” he said. “I can’t deny that the internet says that, the internet says a lot of things. All I can say is that the FCC says, by law, a municipality cannot consider health effects once we demonstrate we’re in full compliance with their regulations.”
During the meeting, members of the Planning Board and Board of Trustees questioned the height of the proposed 125-foot tower, and asked if it could be reduced to 105 feet.
“To me, there’s an immaterial difference between 105 (feet) and 125 (feet) within the village,” Planning Board Chairperson John Bryan said during the meeting.
Bryan said the village would benefit more from a 105-foot tower, instead of the 125-foot tower that would serve more remote areas near the village.
“I represent the village, so if the town were here, they’d probably argue with me,” he said. “It would just seem to me that the real benefit is for the village, and the impact is really totally centered in the village. There are some extraneous impacts as you get farther away, but they’re kind of de minimis when you look between the two.”
Verizon Wireless wants the village to benefit from the cell phone tower, Olson said.
“That is the primary reason, but we also want to build the site so that we can connect to other sites, too,” he said. “We can’t just limit sites to municipal boundaries. If we did, we probably wouldn’t have a viable network right now because we would have so many different requirements in different municipalities.”
The Village Board of Trustees and Planning Board will hold another joint meeting on the project on March 4 at 6:30 p.m.
