Residents Granted Another Cell Tower Hearing

Residents opposed to the construction of a proposed cell tower off Dock Watch Hollow Road were awarded another meeting in which to plead their case at the Warren Township Zoning Board of Adjustment meeting in the municipal complex on Monday night.

Responding to a final call for public comment, Warren resident Alan Davidson, who lives on Jennifer Lane near the proposed cell tower location, said the resident group wanted to bring forward expert witnesses who could not attend on Monday night.

“I am asking for an opportunity to bring our comments at the next meeting,” Davidson said. “We have a number of experts who are difficult to schedule and we have spent a lot of time preparing [closing] comments.”

The attorney for the applicant, Greg Meese, objected to allowing the 15 or so residents, who are mostly from Warren and Bridgewater, more time, alleging that they can hire anybody to testify, which will delay a case that has been going on more than a year.

“There was no prior notice to the board or to the applicant about this issue, nor is there any statement of who these alleged experts are,” Meese said. “The experts should have been here this evening to testify.”

Meese had anticipated that Monday’s meeting would be the conclusion of the case. He brought forth his final witnesses: radio frequency engineer Glenn Pierson, and professional engineer, Greg Nowak.

Pierson, who had testified earlier in the case, was specifically present to speak about the feasibility of Alcatel Lucent’s “light radio” Cube in the Dock Watch Hollow quarry, rather than a 130-foot cell tower. Alcatel Lucent’s “light radio” shrinks a cell tower’s functionality into the size of a three-inch square cube. The unit can be mounted on poles, sides of buildings or anywhere else there is power and a broadband connection.

While opponents of the tower would welcome the technology’s deployment in place of an ominous tower, Alcatel Lucent spokesperson Denise Paniyk-Dale said at the March meeting that light radio remains "a technology, not a product,” and that it would not likely be available until 2013.

While visual impact is one major concern for residents opposed to the tower, the other is clearly their belief the land was not originally intended for more than a public park when purchased in part with open space funds.

Pierson spent the bulk of two hours explaining the differences between a macro network cell tower application and a micro network. Municipalities chose the former, he said, based on the number of subscribers and bandwidth that need to be supported in a particular terrain. The latter, he said, was never intended to replace cell towers, but augment their signal and capacity.

“The original intention from the engineer was to not have to build capacity site in high data traffic areas,” Pierson said. “To create wide area coverage, you’d have to stack them to accommodate frequency bands of which T-Mobile has two and Verizon has four. In theory you put the cube on a telephone pole and it provides spot coverage only,” which is known as a distributed antenna system or DAS.

But board member F. Castanhera challenged Pierson’s lack of enthusiasm for the cube in the quarry application.

“Then why were some towns able to deploy DAS and live without cell towers?” he asked, referring to Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, a municipality that rejected a cell tower in favor of a DAS system. 

“The cube isn’t anything new,” Pierson said. “It’s not changing the laws of physics. It’s a DAS system and DAS has issues.”

At his second opportunity to speak, Davidson asked Pierson, “If this merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is approved, will that provide coverage for T-Mobile in this area?”

“If T-Mobile decides to got on the tower at the top if the hill [Averdale] and were to expand services on the tower, then that whole thing will be fine," Pierson said. "Then, they are one company anyway and [this] doesn’t matter.” 

The next Warren Township Zoning Board of Adjustment meeting concerning this matter is scheduled for June 6.