HILLTOWNS — As a state Supreme Court judge on Monday considers a suit challenging approval in Rensselaerville of a 180-foot tower, Hilltown residents remain divided on the issue.

    For some, the news last year  that the Albany County Sheriff’s Department intended to erect three lofty communication towers in the southern reaches of Albany County — in  Rensselaerville, Berne, and Coeymans  — came as unalloyed good news, especially among first responders who have long complained of spotty radio communication coverage  in the Helderbergs. The Coeymans tower is already under construction.

For others, a vocal segment of the populations of Rensselaerville and Berne, the advent of such  towers in their towns is a decidedly mixed blessing. Their concerns fall into three main categories: future obsolescence, visibility,  and functionality.

A national data system, according to a FirstNet spokesman, would complement a local emergency system and not be able to replace it for years to come. Hidden towers in the Adirondack Park, while offering communication for emergency services, do not provide the trunk line proposed for Albany County, a system the deputy director of Essex County Emergency Services believes is superior and that Ralph Mariani, director of 911 communications for Albany County, says is needed for the high call volume. Radios currently used in the Hilltowns by volunteer first responders will still function under the new system, according to Mariani.

The three towers would be the only new ones built to complete the $19.3 million upgrade — from Very High Frequency to an 800-megahertz  trunked system —  of the county’s emergency communications system for voice transmission.  The other 10 towers  have already been upgraded.  The new system is designed to provide better radio coverage, especially for first responders;  greater “interoperability” among public safety and other agencies, as well as with other counties; and redundancy in the event of a major disaster.

Microwave dishes on the system’s towers allow the towers to relay communications throughout the system. The towers must be able to “see” one another for this purpose,  to form a ring of connectivity

What if...?

What if a planned federal emergency broadband nationwide system eventually  reduces the new towers into big hulking relics in the middle of areas everyone agrees are highly scenic?

In 2012, Congress created the First Responder Network authority, known as FirstNet, allotting $7 billion and 20 megahertz of radio spectrum to build a nationwide broadband network for public safety.

FirstNet came up at a June 26 public hearing before the Berne Planning Board.

One resident, Theresa Schwendeman, asked,  “If FirstNet is adopted by New York State, is this system [the upgraded Albany County system] compatible with that? Or will FirstNet makes this system redundant?”

“Will the county pay to tear it down when it becomes obsolete?”  asked another resident, Cindy Morrison.

The “it” is the tower the Sheriff’s Department wants to put atop U’Hai Mountain which overlooks the hamlet of Berne.

FirstNet came up, too, in public comments made to the Rensselaerville Planning Board last September. Resident Tom Dickens told the board that FirstNet would use a “broad-based system [that]  does not rely on two, three, or four very tall towers but on multiple relatively short antennas. This makes the system more flexible and more nimble and secure,” he maintained.

He termed the sheriff’s plan “a  technology that is already outdated and is ill-equipped to meet the needs of first-responders.”

FirstNet spokesman Ryan Oremland, in an April email to The Enterprise, affirmed Mariani’s objection that the sheriff’s proposal is outdated. “When the FirstNet network is launched,” Oremland wrote, “it will be a high-speed data network that will complement the use of radio systems, and not replace them at first. Our guidance to the states and local jurisdictions is that they should continue to support their Land Mobile Radio system in the near term.”

However, Oremland also said, “We’ll be a data network first...We might be using satellite in some rural areas.”

Albany County currently relies on Verizon for cellular transmission of data.

Any future local presence of FirstNet, Mariani suggests, would be welcomed by local public safety agencies because it would mean the county could rely on a network that solely transmits public safety data, rather than depending, as the county now does, on commercial cellular service.

“Now,” he says, “if a [cell] tower becomes overloaded or is operating above its capacity, we have no more priority than any other customer. Think about 9/11 when people were getting voicemails several days later from their deceased loved ones.”

FirstNet says it hopes to eventually add  mission-critical voice to its menu, but acknowledges that this will not happen anytime soon “in part because the standards [for 4G LTE mission-critical voice] are still under development.”

If New York State does elect to join FirstNet, will  the county system simply become part of  the FirstNet network if that network eventually offers voice, too?

“Any towers Albany County installs are likely to be used by FirstNet….to provide coverage to [the same] areas,” says Mariani. “Both systems will be needed. At some point, FirstNet may offer to host voice traffic; however, that is not the initial plan or priority.

“I don’t feel that anywhere in the near future will we abandon land mobile radio, and if, we do, and if FirstNet actually intends to cover the rural areas, they would need any towers that we build [there] for their system as well.”

High-speed 4G LTE broadband voice  transmission, the FirstNet goal,  would not be easy to accomplish, he asserts.

Mariani maintains that to provide  voice coverage with the same  reliability as the sheriff’s new system is promised to provide — and, in addition,  to do so at 4G speed — would require FirstNet to build many more towers than the target 13 in the sheriff’s system.

“Think about the amount of existing cell towers in the county today, and the amount of dead spots or areas with less than 4G coverage that exist,” he said.

He contends that “if they [FirstNet]  actually intend to cover the rural areas, they would need any towers we build for their system as well.”

Enterprise file photo — Melissa Hale-Spencer

Inspector Ralph Mariani, director of 911 communications for Albany County, explains plans for a 180-foot tower in Rensselaerville at a hearing there last summer.

Do the towers have to be so visible?

The three planned south county towers would be identical in design, appearance and height: self-supporting, lattice-work towers standing 180 feet high, about the height of a 16-story building.  (At the Berne hearing, one Albany County spokesperson suggested it might be possible to reduce the height to 160 feet).   

Currently, the tallest tower in southern Albany County is the DTV tower  on Pinnacle Road on the escarpment plateau, the preferred location for Capital District broadcast towers since the 1940s. At 500 feet in height, it is only 89 feet shorter than the Erastus Corning Tower at Empire Plaza.

But from the entrance to the Berne-Knox-Westerlo schools, which would be almost in its shadow, a 180-foot tower atop U’Hai Mountain would be highly visible.

An identical tower to be built atop Edwards Hill, just southeast of Preston Hollow in Rensselaerville township, would similarly loom large amid spectacular views of the Catskills, views cherished  by many local residents, some of whom moved to the area because of them.

Another resident at the Berne hearing was critical of the highly visible U’Hai site.

Mark Segenberger, who  headed the regulatory programs division at the Adirondack Park Agency, said he reviewed hundreds of  tower applications for the APA.

In a letter to The Enterprise,  Segenberger wrote, “There is no reason 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.”

The Adirondack Park Agency has permitted scores of towers — cell towers, emergency communication towers, and towers that co-locate both functions — to be erected within the park boundaries. The agency prefers multiple-use towers in order to minimize the total number of towers. Many of the Adirondack Park  towers, almost half of them, are located along  the Northway but are not visible from the road.

The agency allows no towers inside the forest preserves of the park.

The APA policy for new telecommunications towers and other tall structures was revised in 2002 to meet the ever-increasing demand for cell phone service and coverage. It states:

“New telecommunications towers located within the Adirondack Park will be located to avoid undue adverse impacts in such a manner as to be substantially invisible.”

Segenberger and others ask , if “substantial invisibility” can be achieved in the mountainous terrain of the Adirondacks, why can’t the same standard be met in the Hilltowns?

In an email to The Enterprise, Keith McCeever, public information officer for the Adirondack Park Agency, wrote:

“We do not have a height limitation.  Our policy calls for —  and we strive to achieve — substantial invisibility, meaning towers are not readily apparent in the landscape when viewing from public lands inside the park.  This means we highly discourage towers that are sky lighted [or]  stand above the tree line.  We often require cell towers be disguised as trees when proposed in areas that are adjacent to Forest Preserve lands or in the land areas that are part of a public viewshed.”

But the APA policy has its critics, especially among those who complain of poor cell phone service in some parts of the park.

A letter writer to the Syracuse Post-Standard claimed poor cell phone service hampered the search for the escapees from Clinton Correctional Facility last year. He wrote:

“...common sense needs to temper their [APA] efforts when public and individual safety is put at risk due to the prohibition of cell towers extending higher than the tree line within the confines of the park.”

McKeever  says a permit APA issued to Essex County  for its new enhanced emergency communications system “includes mostly towers that are shorter than the average telecommunication tower.”

Asked to comment, Mariani told The Enterprise that the “average cell phone tower is from 160 to 180 feet high.”  Any towers over 200 feet or more in height are required to have warning lights by the Federal Aviation Administration. Such lights are extremely expensive to maintain, he says.

Mike Blaise, deputy director of Essex County Emergency Services, said one tower in its system, which was upgraded in 2012 with APA approval,  is on Belfry Mountain. It was permitted by the APA after a balloon-test viewshed study showed that — even though it is 199 feet high, including antenna — it would be visible from only a few spots on nearby roads, providing  it were placed not on the summit but at a lower elevation on the mountain side.

Blaise said the Essex County system also has installations on Little Whiteface Mountain, atop a ski patrol shelter, and another atop a fire tower on Gore Mountain. He said most of the system’s towers co-locate with the State Police or cell-phone companies.

Mariani  said the Essex and Albany county systems are not comparable. “Essex County uses VHF; we are using trunked 800-mhz .  The coverage can't be compared as it's extremely different.  With our population, we need a trunked system to allow the amount of users we have.   Essex has nowhere near the users, or call volume of Albany County.”

Blaise says that Essex County would have preferred a trunked system, too, but it would have required more towers and potentially greater problems in obtaining APA permitting for them.

Mariani says that VHF systems — like Essex County’s  and the one Albany County is replacing — are subject to interference in a way a trunked system is not.

Trunked two-way radio systems are computer-controlled and permit automatic assignment of an open channel to users.

 Will it work better?

Asked to comment on current VHF radio communication in the Hilltowns, where the Sheriff’s office is the only law enforcement agency, Mariani said, “It’s absolutely horrible. In buildings, it is non-existent. On the street, it hovers around 50 percent.

“There are large widespread  dead zones, sudden coverage loss or loss of a call and lack of capacity...The technology being used is over 20 years old.”

His assessment was vehemently echoed by first-responders from throughout southern Albany County who spoke at the Berne public hearing.

Even residents who most passionately decry the towers’  “visual intrusiveness” fully support improving emergency radio communication in the Hilltowns and plugging up the holes in it.  

But doubts have also been raised about the functionality of the Hilltown portion of the new system.

Would the hamlet of Berne, for example, located directly under the proposed tower, be a dead zone, without reliable coverage?  

Asked about this, Mariani told The Enterprise, “The proposed [Berne] tower guarantees coverage  to the hamlet, and should it not, Motorola   is required by contract to ensure that area is covered.”

Motorola is the company that won the contract for the upgraded land mobile radio system.  

He added that “the alternatives [sites] proposed did not provide such coverage in the hamlet.”

Referring  to spotty cellphone coverage in Voorheesville, supplied by a cellular tower on Pinnacle Road, he wrote “The Pinnacle and Voorheesville example is different [from Berne].  [The tower] is much higher than the village, further away, and partially shielded at lower levels by the mountain in the front.”

He also asserted that the Hilltowns are in general “very problematic for communication as are most rural areas with hilly terrain. We...hope to solve that problem, and are confident if we are allowed to proceed we will.”

Another issue raised  has been whether Hilltown first-responders will have the right equipment to make full use of the upgraded system and the new towers.

In April, Bob Tanner, first assistant chief for the Rensselaerville  fire department, told The Enterprise that “the 800 band system isn’t meant for day-to-day use to page firefighters.”

He also said, “The 800-band radios are cost prohibitive for a small fire department.”

Mariani says that, with the new system,  “first responders...will get a mobile radio for each piece of apparatus, and three handheld radios per firehouse, not district.”

Further, he said, “One point that is missed quite often is that the current radios used by individual firefighters for scene operations will still work and function for this purpose” with the new system.

Rensselaer County, which is completing a similarly ambitious upgrade to its emergency communications system, recently received a $750,000 state grant to pay for 1,940 pagers for volunteer firefighters and ambulance rescue squad members.

Mariani says that although “Rensselear County is building a system identical to ours...the paging system is something different.  Pagers work off conventional VHF.

Rensselaer is replacing both the conventional paging and the older analog trunked 800 system they have.  They are putting in a new VHF for fire paging and new 800 Trunked P25 system like us.  We replaced our paging system two years ago, however that also has dead spots that will be corrected with these new towers and microwave ring.”

He says the two counties’ upgraded systems will interface.

 A court may decide

The Hilltown towers issue has produced litigation and legislation.

Judge Gerald Connolly of the the state Supreme Court, the lowest in a three-tiered system, will meet with attorneys for a “court conference” Monday to review claims in tower-related litigation.

A petition brought by Scenic Rensselaerville against the Town of Rensselaerville Planning Board claims  that the board “improperly [authorized] construction of a 180-foot tall communications tower on Edwards Hill..in the middle of the Town’s Scenic Vista Overlay.”  

Scenic Rensselaerville is an association of 170 town residents who oppose the tower as planned.

They cite several grounds for their claim, among them is their contention that the board failed to “consider whether the proposed use [in the words of the town’s Comprehensive Plan] ‘incorporates a site design which preserves the rural character of the Town and is in harmony with the Comprehensive Land Use Plan for the community.’ ”

The Albany County Sheriff and the owners of the land on which the tower would be erected are also named in the petition.  They and the Rensselaerville planning board have asked the court to dismiss the petition.

The Scenic Rensselaerville petition was filed with the court on Dec. 2, 2015.

On Feb, 9, 2016, the Albany County Legislature, at the request of the Albany County Sheriff Craig Apple, passed a resolution which states that towers for the sheriff’s system would be “immune from local regulation.”

The resolution rankled many Hilltown residents who already felt the sheriff’s office had from the get-go failed to  adequately inform and consult with the the towns where the new towers were to be built.