Five Seymour residents urged the Board of Selectmen to reject a plan to put a new cell tower behind a firehouse on Botsford Road.
“I’m quite confident that if this tower was proposed in any of your front or back yards you would be voting against it,” said Marsha Schuck, who lives on Country Club Drive.
AT&T wants to replace an aging, 160-foot cell tower behind the Seymour Fire Department’s Great Hill Hose Co. with a new, 165-foot tower.
The tower would be on a property surrounded by single-family homes, including many pricier homes built within the last decade or so.
A 165-foot monopole just doesn’t fit the neighborhood, residents said. Several neighbors said the $18,000 in annual rent the town stands to make from the tower isn’t worth the headache.
They worried about what the tower could do to property values, not to mention health.
“I don’t see any benefits to the neighbors,” Fairway Lane resident Tom Bennett said.
The cell tower would be powered by a 38-foot-by-18-foot “equipment pad” also to be built on the property.
The town’s Communications Commission, Planning and Zoning Commission, and Board of Fire Commissioners approved the proposal at meetings in December.
Doug Zaniewski, a captain with the Great Hill Hose Co., said neighbors already put up with a lot living near a fire department which trains constantly. If residents oppose the new cell tower, it should not be approved, he said.
“We just want to back them (the neighbors) and represent them,” Zaniewski said.
Schuck questioned whether the town was acting too quickly on the cell tower issue. She urged them to slow down and to listen to neighbors, who previously expressed their displeasure with the replacement tower earlier this month.
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The Selectmen discussed the matter for about five minutes, were advised by their lawyer that he still had a ton of questions to be answered by AT&T lawyers, then voted to take up the matter at a Selectmen’s meeting scheduled for Feb. 18.