Monday, 29 April 2013
Council take note. The tower will stay
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Spending like Mc Guinty":
The Tower is in up and is either now or soon to be working.
I have to assume that Bell would have followed all of the procedures required by Industry Canada.
It wouldn’t be there first tower.
So you want to shut it down or have it moved.
What would you have to do to accomplish this.
Show that they did not follow procedure and/or specifications and illegally erected the tower or that the health concerns are so real and blatant that the government forces them to shut it down.
What is Aurora putting forth for this argument?
Approval process – No, Bell followed it. King and Aurora can throw mud at each other, but King also followed the process. Aurora for that sake did the same. You may not like the way Aurora handled it but they were informed as per the process.
Health – Not enough evidence.
Esthetics – Not a real argument.
So Bell did everything to spec. but you are unhappy about the approval process.
Fine, you fight to get the process changed for the next one, but the Tower will stand – you are not going to move it. Change the process how municipalities communicate to each other over such projects on their borders – but this tower will stand.
Plan B – You try to pay Bell to move it. (First why would they?)
You are asking them to go through the whole process again- finding another site, applications, approvals, meetings, letters, new residents to deal with. They have to re-do all their engineering, site preparations, civil engineering design for a new concrete pad, electrical hook-up at new site, crane rentals for disassembly of the existing tower, trucks to move the tower in sections to new site, re-erect the tower, hook-up, testing, etc, etc. Plus they have to compensate the Bathurst St. landowner at the present site for breach of contract (they have to pay this property owner on the deal they struck with them for putting the Tower on their land in the first place) and they would have to restore his land to the original condition. Meaning removal of all Bell equipment, concrete pad, restoration of vegetation, etc.
How much do you think all of that is really going to cost? Certainly not $100,000 from the Town of Aurora. And why would Bell do it? Pay them enough and make it lucrative and they will move it. But at a tidy profit. $100K is peanuts. They have other business to attend to and new towers to keep on schedule. And why as some suggest would they drop a tower to cover an area where no one lives? It’s like putting a gas station at the end of dead end road. (What is this, the “Field of Dreams” movie – “if you build it, they will come”). No, Bell’s return on investment is to provide service where the most users are located.
Fight the process for the next set of towers, but this one is staying put. Anyone saying otherwise is leading you astray, be it most of council.
There is no battle here, none to be created. It was over before it started.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
12 comments:
Good post Couldn't agree more with you
One concern though, can you simplify your points
Ballard/Gallo/Gaertner may not understand or worse somehow find fault in your assertions
I read somewhere in all of this tower business that there are 20 towers already existing in Aurora.
While I do not drive throughout the town on a regular basis I do cover a fair bit of ground.
And I cannot recall seeing a cell tower. Where are they, when were these built and was there any objection from Aurora residents?
It's ironic that if we already have 20 towers and no objection, that a similar tower in a neighbouring municipality whose shadow reaches into ours when the sun sets would cause such a hullabaloo.
Am I missing something, or are some of our Council elite trying to make a name for themselves as saviours of "our town?"
Focusing on constructive matters would be appreciated.
There are maybe 20-30 homes at most with some direct sightlines from their property that may be affected by the tower, not the hundreds as Mr. Cunningham claims. Those folks may want to improve their landscaping to screen the offending view. Bell may be able to help with this, if residents can prove the actual need. Bell has already said that they are landscaping the base area to help screen the wiring. Companies want to keep communities happy. They will negotiate with those that bring them sensible solutions, not create bigger problems. I really don't want to see any more hand wringing and excessive drama take up more of councils precious time. I'm very tired of Councillor Ballard's antics. He has demonstrated a confrontational pattern of behavior meeting after meeting that is not commendable, even though our ex mayor seems to think otherwise in her "tweets" that keep egging him on.
Ugh.
It's not a tower, it's a windmill.
Chris Ballard is tilting against it, knowing the nonexistent chances of success but already drafting election brochures describing the effort.
It was just another mud-slinging exercise along the lines of what they did to Lucid. Incidentally it appears that George Roche may actually sue the others for grabbing his idea. If he were to call councillors in a lawsuit, would Aurora's taxpayers have to pay legal fees for those councillors? That would really piss me off.
The past council had a thing about heights & those who remain plus Ballard seem similarly stuck in a time-warp . Development stalled because of some mind-set about how tall a building could be despite examples throughout the area proving otherwise could be quite acceptable and attractive.
I find Council's blatant disregard for legal advice astonishing. Have they learned absolutely nothing from the past? Mr. Mar tracks down information they demand be produced out of a hat and does it with patience only to see they proceed into a brick wall. First it was attendance at secret meetings but since then there have been numerous cases of just plain stubborn arrogance. The tower fiasco is a perfect example.
Over at Ballard's blog he noted:
"Residents point to a mounting body of evidence that says radio waves are dangerous. Unfortunately, we are all part of a live experiment and only time will tell.
Am I rushing to turn off my wireless modem and cover my walls in lead foil and wear an aluminum foil hat? No ... but I can understand the concerns of residents -- especially those with children."
I believe he outright knowingly lied. This statement hear is blatantly incorrect:
"Am I rushing to turn off my wireless modem and cover my walls in lead foil and wear an aluminum foil hat? No ... but I can understand the concerns of residents -- especially those with children."
How the above is wrong, let us count the ways:
1. "Cover my walls in lead foil and wear an aluminum foil hat?" The Ballard brigade is always full tilt forward CHARGE with tin foil hats emmanating from bunkers laden with lead foil. How else to explain his ignorance of legal rulings (see Phyllis Morris Case) and opinions (see Mr. Mar's findings that it would be costly and tough to get an injunction against Bell.
2. "but I can understand the concerns of residents..." the residents, Mr. Ballard, elected you to spend money wisely as well as moving council business forward instead of nitpicking. Ballard has failed with money (see Mr. Mar's warnings not waste money legal injunctions against Bell and Ballard voting to continue funding to Morris' legal fees). Ballard is the biggest issue on council right now valiantly making Councillor Gaertners' "I don't understand" queries at the council table look like small potatoes.
3."... especially those with children." Not with continuing to fund legal cases and bribing companies like Bell Canada to take their towers and shove it somewhere else. Our children will be paying the legal costs on this project for years to come if it is apealed higher.
With Ballard, we may be all driven to drink to make fifty some odd dollars expensed look cheap.
3:43 PM
Wow! I hope that felt as good for you to write as it was for me to read it
Thank you
For a ' purported ' journalist, Mr Ballard is incredibly sloppy with words & frighteningly free with the rhetoric.
Here's a revelation.
Who most recently tweeted (within the last 12 hours):
"Push to have #AuroraON Council seek on an injunction against #Bell tower fails. Too late, too much $$ we're told. Other option being sought."
Any guesses? Anyone...
You read the outcome here 1st ahead of any council meeting or tweets.
I think Councilor Ballard is trying to get in the last word with one of his tweets today stating:
“Not right to dismiss health concerns of #Bell telco tower in #AuroraON. Doctors used to prescribe smoking… asbestos was great, etc.”
I don’t believe that others are dismissing cell related concerns so readily, it’s that there isn’t enough proof. Also more damage is probably done by the user with the phone to their head or tweeting and texting with it in their lap as opposed to the tower.
Though not directly intended as a rebuttal to this tweet, a great response to this comes as an excerpt of the May 1st posting by Chris Watts at his blog under the title “We’ve got to fight the Towers that be”.
Chris writes:
“This isn’t a health issue as there are already over 20 cell towers in Aurora, all of which can be viewed on this interactive map here: http://www.loxcel.com/celltower and all of which pass Health Canada regulations. If anyone was trying to make this a matter of public health these towers would need to be drawn into the debate, failing to do so only suggests preferential treatment for one section of the town over another.”
Cut & paste the above http://www.loxcel.com/celltowercellt link to your brower and zoom into Aurora on the map. You will see the locations of all of the towers within the Aurora boundaries.
Post a Comment