East Hampton wants to improve its notoriously spotty cellular service, but some residents are battling the solution: a planned new communications tower.
The town, with its tourist-magnet beaches and hordes of summer visitors, has long struggled with poor reception, which hampers emergency-services responders and inconveniences cell-phone users.
The area faces a “pressing need” for better emergency communications and cell service, according to the local government.
But residents opposed to the new tower have hired a lawyer to fight it.
The town wants to build a 185-ft. tower on a 6.9-acre plot it owns in Springs, a tiny hamlet where famed artist Jackson Pollock once lived. The wooded property is informally used for biking, dog-walking, sledding, other outdoor activities.
“The kids build forts and treehouses and they run around like natives. They love it,” one resident of more than 30 years, Aleaze Schaap-Hodgens, said. “This is the only unregulated piece of land where kids are allowed to do that stuff.
“Just let the kids have a place to play where people aren’t bugging them. And it’s safe, they won’t be run over by someone speeding,” she said.
The new tower would house police and fire department equipment — and have space that could be leased to private cell-service carriers.
A previously constructed 150-ft. tower at the Springs Fire Department can’t be used, both because it is “not adequate” to accommodate both police and fire technology and because of a court order declaring it was illegally built, according to the town.
Neighbors concerned that ice and debris from that tower could fall on adjacent homes filed a lawsuit, after which the town zoning board revoked its building permit. A judge later upheld that decision, according to the town.
The new site is larger, meaning its “fall zone” doesn’t overshadow nearby houses — at least according to the town.
But its immediate neighbors say that’s not so, and that they have the same concerns as the generally high-income residents who fought the fire-department tower.
Residents have also complained the plan was rushed through. They suggest the town uses the illegally-built fire department tower on a temporary, emergency basis.
Alejandro Rodriguez, who lives by the proposed site, told The Post it would be a “huge eyesore.”
Jacki Esposito, another longtime resident, said dozens of families have organized and hired a lawyer to fight the proposal. “They are attempting to improve cell service for all, at the expense, from our perspective, of our neighborhood,” she said.
She said the neighborhood also happened to be largely working-class and Latino. “It raises questions about why here,” she said.
“There are powerful voices in that neighborhood, and maybe not here,” she added, referring to the area immediately around the firehouse.
Not all residents are opposed to the new tower.
“There are more than a few of us who live in or traverse ‘dead zones’ who do not have the ability to make a 911 call,” one resident in favor of the tower told The Post.
The town has started an online poll to search out “any and all concerns that citizens may or may not have regarding wireless infrastructure.”
The town is also considering a temporary tower at another site.
While nobody wants the tower in their neighborhood, “everybody demands communications where they live,” said town supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc at a July meeting, according to the East Hampton Star.
Neither Scoyoc nor the local police and fire departments returned calls.