Antenna proposed for roof of Route 20 senior facility can’t be higher than 50 feet
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Dish Network is looking to install antennas on the roof of the Promenade assisted-living facility on Western Avenue in Guilderland.
GUILDERLAND — Residents in the McKownville neighborhood can rest easy with Dish Network’s plan to install antennas on the roof of the Promenade at University Place.
The company is proposing to install “new wireless telecommunications antennas” on the roof of the 42-foot-tall assisted-living facility located at 1228 Western Ave.
A Jan. 31 email apparently misinterpreting the proposal was sent by the McKownville Improvement Association to neighbors alerting them to the project’s legal notice in the Jan. 27 edition of The Enterprise. Due in no small measure to the notice’s legalese, it could sound as if Dish were looking to install 48-foot-tall antennas on the building’s roof.
The legal notice says the “new facility will include antennas with a top height of 48ft. on a 42-foot building,” which could easily be misread as a proposal to place an antenna on the roof that would rise 90 feet above the ground, when the actual distance from the top of the roof to the top of the antenna is six feet.
Even if Dish’s proposal had been a serious one, it wouldn’t have gotten very far. Guilderland adopted a local law in 2019 that placed restrictions on how high wireless equipment can extend above a rooftop.
Depending on what Dish Network, which provides mobile-phone services to 8.77 million subscribers and about the same number of satellite-television customers, meant by “wireless telecommunications antennas,” the new facility could have been no more than 50 feet in height — a number that takes into account the height of the antenna.
Or, based on a different definition in the town’s zoning code, the antenna itself can’t extend higher than six feet “above the surface of the roof directly beneath” it.
On Feb. 1, the McKownville Improvement Association sent out an email to explain that the 48-foot height will be measured from the ground not the rooftop and also to “encourage interested parties to do your own research and, if you wish, register your individual comments on the subject.”
The email said New York’s State Historic Preservation Office will review the comments.
