OCEAN CITY — Resort officials this week made it abundantly clear they
are strongly against a proposal to install as many as 90 cell phone
towers, some as tall as 38 feet, throughout Ocean City and are asking
residents and visitors to join in the opposition.
Two weeks ago, through a seemingly innocuous legal advertisement, the
private sector company Crown Castle announced a proposal to install as
many as 90 distributed antenna systems, essentially cell phone towers,
at locations throughout Ocean City, including many of the resort’s
residential neighborhoods. The towers would range from about 18 feet to
as high as 38 feet and are needed to expand bandwidth and improve
Internet accessibility in the densely populated resort.
Crown Castle approached resort officials in 2015 about installing the
necessary technology to expand bandwidth and improve Internet
accessibility, but that initial proposal called for installing the
hardware on existing structures including light poles and other utility
poles. The Mayor and Council had some concerns about even that concept,
but when Crown Castle returned this spring with a vastly different
proposal to install as many as 90 new towers throughout Ocean City,
resort officials took exception to the plan.
“At the time, we had some concerns with this, but we were willing to
work with them,” said City Engineer Terry McGean, who outlined the
town’s opposition to the proposal during Monday’s Mayor and Council
meeting. “They went through a couple of different consultants and this
spring they came back to us and their proposal was substantially
different than what we had previously seen.”...
...“We told them very strongly we are opposed these installations,
particularly in our residential neighborhoods where utilities are
already undergrounded,” he said. “They have submitted for over 90 of
these installations and we have not approved a single one of them at the
local level.”...
http://mdcoastdispatch.com/2016/10/04/ocean-city-council-seeking-publics-help-in-opposing-proposed-cell-towers/
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