Voters asked to weigh in on tower question

PALMER — Come October, voters will have a chance to weigh in on the controversial issue of communication towers.

In a 5-2 vote last week, the Mat-Su Borough Assembly decided to ask voters whether towers should be required to be at least the same distance from property lines as they are tall.

The vote will be advisory, meaning that voters will essentially be telling the assembly how they feel rather than creating a new regulation.

“We can’t bring a ballot proposition forward to bring a regulatory change in this particular kind of matter,” said the resolution’s sponsor, Warren Keogh.

Currently, towers can be 10 feet from a property line or 25 from a public right of way such as a road. Keogh said residents have concerns about safety — that, however unlikely it may be, towers can fall over — visual impacts — that towers might block views — and a potential decrease in property values.

“I think they are the best experts on whether or not we should have these kinds of regulations,” Keogh said of voters.

John Klapperich, former owner of KMBQ radio, said that in his experience towers are a very complicated issue. Klapperich was a member of a committee that looked at tall structure ordinances in the borough for two years. He said work on those ordinances entailed massive amounts of work cataloguing all the different types of towers in the Valley and examining their methods of construction.

“I really challenge you that you are doing a disservice to the voters to say let’s just throw this out on an advisory vote,” Klapperich said. “If you want to become experts on it, go to school, but don’t just throw it to the voters because every tower is different.”

Assemblyman Mark Ewing, who eventually voted against putting the idea to a vote, said he speaks from experience.

“I do have 20 years in the construction trades building communications towers,” he said. “I have built towers for the state of Alaska, … I’ve built towers out on the Arctic Ocean.”

Noting that he would not be on the assembly after October’s election, he said his colleagues would be deciding what to do with the public’s advice without him. But he said he doesn’t think voters will approve the regulation.

He said he thinks the telecommunications industry would do a good job educating the public about why it’s a bad idea. And it’s a bad idea, he said, because it will drive up construction costs for towers, which would be passed on to subscribers’ cellphone bills.

He also said safety fears are overblown, that towers are not built to fail. Assemblyman Noel Woods agreed.

“Having done the anchor work on the 750-foot tower out there in Knik-Goose Bay I can admit that they are very much over-engineered,” Woods said.

Assemblyman Ron Arvin sided with Ewing.

“It would be a travesty to send this question to the voter. This is a complex issue, so complex that it has taken experts from around the country to come and try to educate staff and policymakers from prior assemblies to try to get this issue resolved,” Arvin said.

Most voters don’t have the luxury of that level of education on the issue, he said.

“If I didn’t know anything about construction I might think that that’s a good idea,” Arvin said.

Keogh said he was taken aback at Arvin’s comments.

“I guess I’m surprised to hear from a fellow assembly member that it’s a travesty to bring it before the voters and I would argue that it’s not that complex an issue,” Keogh said. “It’s standard language nationwide and I think it’s relatively simple.”

Assemblyman Vern Halter said he is in favor of taking a vote.

“It doesn’t bother me if we let the voters vote on this, frankly, and it doesn’t bother me if they vote in favor of it. The vote is advisory,” Halter said.

Local developer Butch Moore raised a question drawn from his own personal experience about what the borough was doing to avoid building too many towers by pushing the industry to put more than one antenna on a tower. Halter said Moore was on to something.

“I think Mr. Moore hit the issue right in the butt. The real issue here is co-location, how can we encourage co-location?”

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.