To the Editor:

The June 16 public hearing for the sheriff’s proposed communications tower in Berne was well attended. I appreciate all of the volunteer firefighters and emergency medical services personnel, including the many from outside the town of Berne, who took the time to attend the hearing and express their support for the project. These folks put their time and well-being on the line for all of us and I commend them for their commitment to our communities.

I also appreciate those concerned citizens who oppose the Jansen Lane site and spoke at the meeting. Many have served or are serving on various boards in the town of Berne, and they too generously give their time and efforts to benefit the Berne community.

It was heartening to participate in a respectful meeting where there was 100-percent agreement on the purpose of the project, that is, to improve the public safety radio system that has been deficient for decades. The only disagreement was how best to achieve that goal.

This is not a zero sum game where one side has to “win” and the other side has to “lose.” Hopefully, some at the hearing learned something new, that only a few hours away in the Adirondack Park, telecommunications towers are planned, designed, and installed to be “substantially invisible” while providing the desired cell-phone service or emergency-services radio communications.

A few persons supporting the Jansen Lane site spoke of the need to embrace new technology, that highly visible towers are a fact of life, and that we need to simply “get used to them.” This might be true if there really was no other way. But now we all know there is another way as demonstrated for the last 15 years by the Adirondack Park Agency.

Sixty-three new telecommunication towers in new locations have been approved that are carefully sited so as to not be readily seen by the public. There is no reason that we should have to “get used to” a visually intrusive tower, especially one in our community center, when there are existing proven practices to avoid and mitigate those impacts. Please see the APA's Towers Policy and Towers Information at its website.

One speaker suggested that opponents of the Jansen Lane site were NIMBYs (not in my backyard) and that they want the project relocated so presumably persons other than themselves would be impacted. That is certainly not the case here.

The proposed 180-foot tall tower will be in some residents' backyards along the south side of Route 443, but it will be in everyone's “front yard” given its proposed prominent location overlooking the hamlet center. The Jansen Lane site maximizes the number of people who live, work, and recreate in Berne or travel through the hamlet.

It's visibility from public gateway roads, churches, public schools, library, recycling center, town park and more than 140 commercial and residential properties ensures it will be seen daily by very large numbers of residents and visitors. Proposing to relocate it to a less visually intrusive site benefits the whole community and the scenic character of the area as valued in the town's comprehensive plan. Calling someone a NIMBY is often a backhanded way of trying to discredit what is a legitimate environmental concern.

The New York State Legislature recognized the importance of addressing environmental matters early in the planning and design of projects when it passed the State Environmental Quality Review Act. SEQRA establishes a process to systematically consider environmental factors early in the planning stages of actions that are directly undertaken, funded, or approved by local, regional and state agencies.

By incorporating environmental review early in the planning stages, projects can be modified as needed to avoid adverse impacts on the environment. Visual and aesthetic issues are legitimate areas of concern and need to be considered along with engineering, access, safety, costs, and other aspects of project design.

Potential visual impacts are an obvious and critical issue when reviewing commercial wind turbines, cell towers, transmission lines, and other tall structures. In this case, Albany County did not consider potential visual impacts during project planning that began in 2011.

The county only attempted to address visual impacts after the application was submitted with the tower already designed and the site selected. The Crane Visibility Test Report and the Visual Impact Assessment submitted in May 2016 is an after-the-fact attempt to rationalize and justify a visually impactful project. Unfortunately, those documents are seriously misleading and draw false and unsupported conclusions.

While I oppose the Jansen Lane location and am critical of the content of the county's application, I do sincerely applaud Sheriff Craig Apple for trying to address this longstanding public-safety radio communications problem after decades of neglect and underfunding by federal, state, and county governments.

Unfortunately, when some of the most important stakeholders of the project are left out of the planning process, those in Berne and Knox who have to live daily with the intrusive tower, then controversy and delays inevitably follow. I fully appreciate the county's reluctance to start over with new sites given its investment in time and resources spent so far, but there is still time to get this right and satisfy all concerns.

I hope Sheriff Apple will use the example set by town supervisors in Saratoga County in June 2006 when they withdrew their application to the APA for three highly visible, new mountain-top towers to upgrade their county-wide emergency services radio communications system. They subsequently reconsidered their approach and with their consultants submitted a revised project design that included four new towers (and two co-location sites).

It was approved later in 2006 as being substantially invisible under the APA’s Tower Policy. Saratoga County successfully upgraded its emergency radio system while protecting the high quality scenic viewsheds in their Adirondack communities.

Only Sheriff Apple's leadership can make this a positive outcome for Albany County and the Hilltown communities by directing his consultants to design a less visually intrusive project.

Mark Sengenberger

Berne

Editor’s note: Mark Sengenberger is a member of the Game Farm Board, which was appointed to map a mission for the property the town purchased on Game Farm Road. See related story.