VTel drops Plainfield tower plan

Vermont Telephone Co. Inc. has scrapped its plans for a telecommunications tower in Plainfield, saying the town “kicked out” the company.
http://www.timesargus.com/article/20141030/NEWS01/710309883

Published October 30, 2014 in the Times Argus VTel drops Plainfield tower plan By Eric Blaisdell STAFF WRITER PLAINFIELD — Vermont Telephone Co. Inc. has scrapped its plans for a telecommunications tower in Plainfield, saying the town “kicked out” the company. Springfield-based VTel had been planning to build the tower on Upper Road, about 2,000 feet from a similar tower owned by Cloud Alliance, a local provider of broadband service. VTel had requested a certificate of public good from the Public Service Board for the tower in April. The town opposed the tower’s construction as not in compliance with the town plan, which calls for communication companies to co-locate services where possible. The town asked for and was granted a public hearing on the matter, which was meant to take place next month. Rather than go through litigation over the tower, CEO Michel Guité said his company would simply walk away from the project. “We got kicked out,” he said. “We formally withdrew after we got kicked out. They said to us, ‘Look, either you spend $200,000 litigating it or else go home.’” Guité said his company’s conversations with town representatives weren’t angry and it would respectfully depart. He added that VTel doesn’t want to be in conflict with any town. “If the town says we can’t be here, we say, ‘OK, we’ll go somewhere else,’” he said. Bram Towbin, a Select Board member in Plainfield who has been critical of the way the company has been handling communications with the town about the project, said Tuesday he isn’t against telecommunications towers. “When they comply with what our town plan is, I think it’s great,” he said. In May, Gordon Mathews, site acquisition manager at VTel, said there were two obstacles to co-locating on Cloud Alliance’s tower. The first, he said, was that it would have to be reinforced to support VTel’s equipment. Mathews disputed an assertion by Michael Birnbaum, general manager of Cloud Alliance, that Cloud Alliance offered to reinforce the tower at no cost to VTel. “(Cloud Alliance) offered the possibility that VTel could pay for the cost to modify the tower up front and that (cost) might be able to be recouped over time by way of a rent reduction,” Mathews said, suggesting that was different from saying Cloud Alliance would pay for the reinforcement. The second obstacle, according to Mathews, was coverage. He said the tower would have brought service to about 600 locations or “rooftops” without access to broadband. “The tower we’re proposing would provide broadband wireless service to almost 3,400 homes in the Plainfield, Calais, Marshfield and Barre area. About 615 of those homes are what the federal government has classified as unserved or underserved in terms of Internet service,” he said in May. Mathews said that if VTel did co-locate on the Cloud Alliance tower, the coverage would be reduced by 10 percent of the 3,400 number. “Every rooftop that we’re planning to cover under the network is critical,” Mathews said. “Ten percent is a significant number.” Others have suggested VTel simply didn’t want to pay rent for space on the existing tower. In December, Birnbaum said VTel had approached his company earlier about co-locating. He said Cloud Alliance offered to rent space on the tower at fair market value. But Birnbaum said VTel didn’t consider the rent offer fair market value, and the negotiations ended. Now, Guité speaks as if co-locating on Cloud Alliance’s tower was never an option. He said Wednesday his company “simply can’t go on a tower that doesn’t fit for us.” “We can’t use that tower,” Guité said. “It’s just not a good site.” He said if that tower were a viable option, other companies like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile would be using it. If VTel had been able to build the tower in Plainfield, federal dollars would have been used in its construction. Those dollars will dry up in June, another reason Guité said his company canceled the project, because it didn’t have time to litigate. Those federal dollars also come with strings, and Guité said VTel couldn’t “use government funds to go on a bad tower.” Birnbaum said Wednesday that he had been in communication with VTel about co-locating on its tower all the way up to a couple of days before VTel submitted its application to the PSB in April.