Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who is also vice president of the North Calais Neighborhood Coalition.
[T]he 30 years I’ve lived five miles out on a dirt road, where for six months company is rare, I’ve had a recurring nightmare. I wake in the night to the sound of heavy equipment that seems to be operating in the eight-acre meadow adjacent to our house. When I put on clothes and go outside, it’s chillingly true. Bulldozers, graders and bucket loaders are all in the process of transforming what I’ve relied on for solitude for decades into something clamorous and unrecognizable.
What about local regulations, bylaws, development review boards or the town plan? All are irrelevant to this process largely thanks to Vermont Section 248.
As I run screaming into the now treeless and suddenly paved expanse, I’m confronted by a guy in a hard hat. A big guy I’ve never seen before but he’s certainly intimidating as he blocks my path, waving an official looking document in my face. “Eminent domain” is all he says, as if that illuminates sufficiently and justifies completely what’s going on. I usually wake up at this point, covered in perspiration, mumbling obscenities until I get my bearings and breathe a long sigh of relief.
Over the years I’ve taken great comfort in the fact that my reverie has remained largely unsullied and in the notion that our little quasi-community in North Calais similarly provides an oasis of bountiful natural resources that feed the souls of anyone lucky enough to live here, have access to a camp on Nelson Pond or believes swimming in Mirror Lake borders nirvana. We share the place with deer, bear, moose, eagles, loons, ospreys, owls and a menagerie of creatures who enrich our daily lives more than you can imagine.
But the nightmare that’s loomed in my subconscious all these years has returned, this time in reality, as VTel arrives on a bucolic hillside, determined to build an unnecessary 140 foot tall communications tower in spite of near universal opposition. It gets even worse as we slowly learn there’s hardly a hope of stopping them, particularly when federal money is on the table and greedy corporate fingers reflexively reach out, going around over or through whatever or whomever is in their way.
As the process unfolds, the magnitude of the issue transcends the tower itself and instead focuses on our becoming a collective nothing — a mere pit stop in the inexorable march toward building a steel monstrosity on a beautiful hill, which incidentally provides no service the community does not already have or cannot be co-located on an existing tower a couple of miles away. But that evidently is immaterial.
But VTel has shown little interest in the redundancy issue as they relentlessly pursue their goal of 180 towers across Vermont, completing a grid with enormous money-making potential — especially since most of the infrastructure will be paid for by taxpayers via tens of millions of dollars worth of low interest loans or outright grants.
Given all that cash, no red blooded American corporation is going to walk away when the other option is to simply trample the rights of Vermonters, which would be bad enough, save the very laws you might think would protect ordinary citizens from such outrage are actually more likely to stencil “welcome” on our backs with big, block letters.
Health concerns regarding communications towers would seem a likely place to start the revolt, considering there have been thousands of well documented, peer-reviewed research projects illustrating the risks of living near a facility that emits radiation. However, the Federal Communication Commission in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 expressly prohibits local governments from considering health effects when making zoning decisions about towers.
That’s right, you can’t mention that towers make people sick. Well, you can but no one has to listen but that’s not unusual, apparently, they don’t have to listen to anything.
What about local regulations, bylaws, development review boards or the town plan? All are irrelevant to this process largely thanks to Vermont Section 248 which essentially stipulates that although communities “participate” and are able to provide “input,” nothing they say, do or think will have any bearing on the outcome of the “hearings.” Imagine the illegitimate child of Town Meeting Day and Joseph Stalin’s show trials and you get the picture.
Since emerging from November’s gubernatorial election bloodied by a relatively unknown and dramatically underfunded Scott Milne, Peter Shumlin appears to have become an avatar of sorts for the “Vermont Way,” a nebulous yet user friendly sound bite (presumably) for something done in a specific, appropriate manner, unique to the North Country values we all hold dear. The beauty of the phrase is that it’s extremely positive sounding and we all assume we know what it means, making it utilitarian for a variety of situations.
So how about it governor — is VTel’s pattern of ignoring the concerns of Vermonters here in North Calais, and seemingly everywhere else in the state, the “Vermont Way”? Or are they exempt from that too?
