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A proposed state telecommunication tower has caused a flurry of activity in Veazie this fall. The tower, intended to be part of the Maine State Communication Network, was slated to be built in the Buck Hill neighborhood until a group of the town’s residents objected.
The tower would be the newest link in a telecommunication chain designed to span the state and provide an emergency communication system for state agencies such as the state police and the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife.
Last spring, the state spoke with Allan Thomas, Veazie’s tax assessor and code enforcement officer, about placing the tower in Veazie. During those discussions, an undeveloped area of land in the Buck Hill neighborhood was identified as an acceptable location for the tower. However, Thomas did not bring that information to Veazie’s town council.
Veazie’s Buck Hill neighborhood is located between Route 2 and Interstate 95, north of Chase Road. If the tower were built on the land behind the neighborhood, it would be visible from the interstate.
When neighborhood residents noticed surveyors mapping the land behind their homes, they started asking questions.
“A number of citizens became quite concerned,” said Robert Rice, a Veazie resident and professor of wood science at the University of Maine. “That’s a residential neighborhood. That’s an area that had been slated for a housing development.”
According to Rice, the land specified for the construction of the telecommunication tower is only half of the space the tower will actually require.
Rice said the undeveloped land behind the Buck Hill neighborhood is also designated as a scenic area in the town’s comprehensive development plan. Many Veazie residents are objecting to the tower, which they claim would be an eyesore.
“They say that they’re afraid it will wreck their property value,” Thomas said, adding that concerns about radiation from the tower were also voiced. He said any radiation emitted from the tower would be minimal.
Residents’ objections and questions prompted the town council to address the issue. They discovered Veazie did not have an ordinance regulating towers. A moratorium was placed on the construction of towers until the town could draft an ordinance to address residents’ concerns.
That newly drafted ordinance was the subject of an open meeting of the town planning board Nov. 15. According to Rice, more than 30 residents attended the meeting to discuss what he termed a “hybrid zoning ordinance.”
The ordinance as it is currently drafted specifies that communication towers must be no more than 125 feet from the base to the tip. Towers taller than 35 feet must be built in a specific corridor of land next to the interstate. Towers cannot be built within 1,000 feet of a home in a residential district. The town will not allow more than three communication towers to be built in a 200-acre area.
Thomas said the drafted ordinance is the result of the town’s need for one, which was discovered after the state began planning to build its tower in Veazie, not to bar the state from building a tower.
“You can’t just take action to prohibit some individual thing — that’s a violation of the law,” Thomas said. “It’s high time they did address towers in general. They ought to have done it years ago.”
Rice also emphasized that the drafted ordinance is not an attempt to prohibit the construction of a state-operated telecommunication tower in Veazie.
“The idea wasn’t and isn’t to write an anti-state-tower ordinance,” Rice said. “The idea is to write an ordinance about towers that includes community values.”
Rice said the new ordinance precludes the state from building its telecommunication tower in the Buck Hill neighborhood but allows it to be built in an industrial zone near Kelley Road.
He recognized the need for emergency communication and said state officials were involved in the drafting process to determine appropriate wording and reasonable restrictions.
A benefit of the telecommunication tower would be the elimination of dead spots in the communication network used by local public safety officials. Currently, communication for the area is relayed through an antenna located on top of UMaine’s Hilltop Commons. That antenna could be attached to the proposed state-operated telecommunication tower, which would strengthen the system’s coverage in Veazie.
“Everyone in the town, we’re all sensitive to that,” Rice said, explaining the danger of dead spots in the town’s emergency communication system. “They [the state] have a number of valid concerns about their own system. It’s an old system.”
The construction of the telecommunication system would aid the state in switching its emergency communication system from an analog signal to a digital one.
Although the industrial zone on Kelley Road is being touted as a better location for the tower, Thomas said the state could still build it at the Buck Hill location if it chose to do so through eminent domain. He said one route the state could take in order to avoid the ordinance is to ask the governor for an exemption.
“I think, probably within less than a month, the state will take action to make the tower exempt from zoning,” Thomas said. “If it’s exempt from zoning, I just step back and let them do it.”
Now that the planning board has approved the drafted ordinance, it has to pass a vote by the town council in December before it can be enacted.
Bangor Daily News