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Date: 10/28/2020
SOUTHWICK – For the third straight meeting, the Southwick Planning Board once again continued the public hearing for a proposed Verizon cell tower off Liberty Lane.
Verizon engine Jay Latorre once again gave a presentation discussing the necessity for the tower and the benefits it would have.
“It is a pretty significant enhancement and is going to go a long way toward us eliminating the coverage gap and also spreading the wealth more evenly across existing facilities so that the existing facilities are not responsible for providing as much coverage,” he said.
After Planning Board Chair Michael Doherty asked about the utility of small cell facilities Latorre explained that they help prevent coverage gaps.
“Small cells are part of a wireless communications network solution that utilizes many different tools. Small cells have benefits, they should be included in a modern wireless network and there are two purposes for them. The first is to enhance network capacity and resolve small coverage gaps,” he said.
He added that in this instance a smaller cell would not suffice to bridge the coverage gap.
“Our responsibility is to look at the solutions that are going to eliminate the coverage gap and enhance network capacity, and that’s what the proposed facility does. That’s not something a small cell can appropriately do in a gap of this size,” Latorre said.
After residents raised concerns at the last meeting over the map Verizon was using, Latorre said they put together a new one to show exactly how the facility would help with Verizon’s cell coverage.
“We expanded the map again so you could see the coverage from existing facilities and where they were dominant. We changed the colors from the list that we had available so that it was clearer to see how the proposed facility does a good job of enhancing coverage, minimizing the coverage gap, and providing meaningful offload to adjacent sites,” he said.
Attorney Michael Fenton, who represented Verizon during the hearing, said this was the only possible location for the tower.
“Since the off Foster Road site leased to us by the town of Southwick and we know that we can comply with the setbacks at this location, we’ve determined that is the only feasible site in town to satisfy this coverage gap,” he said.
Residents in the call once again were against the cell tower being in a residential area.
“Building a 120-foot-tall commercial structure in the middle of a pristine residential neighborhood is unthinkable and from my standpoint should be considered a last resort,” one resident, Jeremy Fiorentino, said.
Town Moderator Celeste St. Jacques also jumped into the public comment session to say that residents should pay more attention to the town’s government to prevent issues like this in the future.
“I agree that nobody is happy we are in this situation. One of the reasons why we are in this situation is going back to when the lease was originally signed in 2017, that we need people to get more involved at the early stages to prevent something like this from getting to this point,” she said.
One of the issues in putting the tower in a different spot is because it is required to be built in the wireless overlay district per the town’s bylaws and Doherty said changing the bylaw could take years.
“To some degree I’m happy to have that conversation going forward about changing things and whether they are appropriate or not. As far as what we’re doing here, we’re sort of constrained by what we can do,” he said.