How It Began
The story starts several years ago.
The citizens of Franklin Park have spoken clearly and loudly on each previous occasion when Verizon proposed to build a cell tower at the golf course. Franklin Park’s residents said NO to this idea in 2017. They said NO to it in 2020. Each time, we foolishly believed the Borough Council’s assurances that it had no interest in any further proposals to build a cell tower at the golf course.
On the first proposal in 2017, SBA (a cell tower company acting in conjunction with Verizon) persuaded Borough Council to amend the zoning code in such a way that it essentially pointed a giant arrow to the golf course. (It did so by requiring a 50-acre parcel. In the R2 zoning area, we don't know of any other parcels that size.)
In the face of intense pressure from nearby homeowners, Borough Council (quoting its public statement) “requested that SBA Towers terminate the option it holds for the golf course location.”
SBA ultimately did not attempt to move forward with the tower at that time, but in January 2020, SBA and Verizon once more asked the Borough Council to lease them a site at the Clover Hill golf course. Council President Hogg stated that the proposal was unsolicited and that Council was not receptive to it; it did not move forward.
Since the Borough Council had presented itself on two consecutive occasions as understanding that this was an inappropriate place for a cell tower, and as not being interested in leasing land there to build a cell tower, we believed that the Borough Council would not take sneaky, backroom actions to promote building one.
Their actions since then, unfortunately, have proven otherwise.
The Technology Advisory Committee
The plot thickens.
At the beginning of 2021, with a bare minimum of public disclosure and no effort whatsoever to reach out to affected residents, the Borough Council formed what it called a “Technology Advisory Commitee,” or TAC. No agenda nor minutes from its first meeting were ever made public, contrary to the PA Sunshine Act, but minutes from its second meeting (February 9th, 2021) listed its primary focus as:
Major
Cell Coverage – Matt Garland
• Reis Run Corridor and Clover Hill Golf Course
• Verizon approached the Borough last year and wanted to put a tower on the golf course. Residents in the area were not in favor. Council denied the request.
• TAC to explore other opportunities.
• Invite Verizon to the next TAC meeting to discuss proposal
• Include McCandless TAC at the next meeting with Verizon.
(Incidentally, radio reception was listed as "Minor," and only covered briefly. Thus we see once more whether this was actually about radio reception, or cell coverage.)
We thus see that the TAC’s focus was not on Franklin Park’s needs or residents’ concerns, but on Verizon – an invited guest almost from the very outset. How invited? Well, the very next month's minutes show that four different Verizon employees and an affiliated “site acquisition” specialist were listed as "invited guests." Their concerns were all the TAC wanted to hear:
New Business
Verizon Cellular Tower Proposal
Verizon discussed the issues with cellular coverage in the Reis Run Corridor in the area of Clover Hill Golf Course.
• Members of the TAC who live in this area confirm that cell coverage in this area is poor. Franklin Park Police report dropped service on their onboard laptops when traveling Reis Run Rd. However, there has not been a request from residents in the area to the borough to improve cellular service.
• Proposal is to erect a 150” tall monopole behind the maintenance building adjacent to the golf course. This is the third time this proposal will be submitted to the borough. The previous proposals were rejected by council.
• Alternatives to a monopole are limited in this area because utilities are underground so there are no existing utility poles in the neighborhoods.
• There has not been site modeling done in the past. Verizon indicated that it is possible and will provide a model.
• No financial obligation for the borough. Revenue will be generated for lease of the property.
• Verizon agreed to submit a formal proposal to include
o Site assessment with model of the proposed monopole
o Alternative to monopole
o Clear information on the cellular coverage in the area
o Opportunities for co-location with other carriers
The TAC, having noted the proposal’s two previous defeats, could have involved local homeowners.
It could have asked residents why we did not want a giant, dangerous eyesore located nearby, in case the answer were not immediately obvious.
It could have asked why Verizon was being so pushy about building this giant tower when “there has not been a request from residents in the area to the borough to improve cellular service.”
It could have asked about other ways that Verizon could improve cell service.
It could have challenged Verizon’s statement (not recorded in the minutes, but reported verbally by multiple TAC members) that it was not willing to pay to do the job right with small cells, even though it had decided to pay for small cells in neighboring McCandless.
It could have asked why Verizon lacks coverage here compared to rivals like T-Mobile, and why Franklin Park Borough should have any responsibility at all to help Verizon gain ground against its competitors.
Instead, the TAC did none of those. The TAC’s April minutes say nothing at all about cell service except that “Verizon has asked for additional time to prepare their proposal. They would like to return to the proposed site when the leaf cover is at its peak.” By May’s meeting, “John Park [sic] asked the committee to keep improvement of cell phone service at the top of our list. Matt Garland has been in touch with Verizon and is awaiting further information from them.”
Verizon, Verizon, Verizon. The TAC was so intimately in contact with Verizon that it might as well have been a Verizon subsidiary. Meanwhile, the public was so intentionally excluded from the TAC’s deliberations that the old boys’ club didn’t even bother having its June 3rd, 2021 meeting at the Borough Building as the end of the previous month's minutes had promised. Rather, the June meeting's minutes report that “The meeting was held in person at the Franklin Park Fire Station.”
The TAC made zero effort to inform residents of its existence (much less its deliberations) until I accidentally discovered it nine months into its existence, in early September, while looking for information on something else. By this point the minutes from the August 5th, 2021 meeting looked like this:
The committee discussed the public safety concerns given the current situation with radios. At this point, the most reasonable solution appears to be erection of a communication tower on the Clover Hill Golf Course. The committee agreed to pursue this option with the primary and urgent purpose of placing radio repeaters.
At 7:30 pm, David Farquhar from SBA Communications Corporation joined the meeting. SBA owns the communication tower in Linbrook Park and was part of the proposal submitted in 2017 to place a tower at Clover Hill Golf Course. SBA is willing to work with the TAC to submit a new proposal to Borough Council for a communication tower located at Clover Hill Golf Course. Key points from the discussion:
• SBA will bear all costs to build the tower. There will be no expense to the Borough
• SBA will lease the land (likely 100x100 feet) from the Borough
• There will be no cost to the Borough to place a radio repeater on the tower
• SBA will lease space to the cellular providers on the tower for their equipment
The committee discussed the approach to informing the community about this potential project. Key points from the discussion:
• Talking points will be developed so that all parties from the borough are disseminating the same information
• The TAC would like to have an informational community meeting before a proposal comes before the Planning Commission, Zoning Hearing Board or Council
SBA will be providing additional information as follows:
• Photo simulations of the proposed site on the golf course
• Photo of stealth monopole
• Notes from previous community meetings
• Information from the carriers on how they handle generator power
The committee agreed that the September 5, 2021 meeting will be a work session with SBA to review additional information, develop talking points and plan for a community information session.
Apparently we were just now reaching a point where involved homeowners might hear something, eventually – but not until “talking points” had been standardized, “so that all parties from the borough are disseminating the same information”. Ah.
And indeed, its planned agenda for the September 2nd, 2021 meeting looked like this:
Focus on communication tower in Clover Hill Golf Course
• Working session on the cell tower issue –
- talking points,
- community discussion and engagement planning,
- leveraging prior work from 2017,
- acknowledging public safety issue,
• Update re: Verizon
• Guest: David Farquhar, Territory Director, SBA Communications
Corporation (other SBA employees joining via Zoom)
Interestingly, when residents showed up for this meeting, the TAC and David Farquhar lied through their teeth, stating clearly to us that – to quote their own minutes from that meeting:
Members of the TAC assured the community that no decisions or recommendations had been made regarding a cell tower on the golf course. Information gathering is still in progress. The process will be transparent. At the appropriate time, there will be meetings to share the information with the community.
That’s certainly an interesting way of reporting the previous month’s “The committee agreed to pursue this option” – that is, having SBA build a cell tower at the golf course – and of summarizing several months’ worth of meetings at which no other coverage ideas ever appear to have been mentioned, much less examined.
Inevitably, the plan -- in addition to belatedly deciding to include residents -- involved "meeting with Verizon on September 9," one week later, "to review their findings and recommendations."
However, having realized that their element of surprise was lost, the TAC then regrouped. From following Borough Council minutes, the main job appeared to become protecting their goals from accountability and democracy. In the Borough Council’s January 19th, 2022 pre-meeting – the pre-meetings being technically open to the public, but held behind closed doors such that members of the public generally assume they are not welcome – John Parks, one of Verizon’s chief cronies on the TAC, stated that:
Mr. Parks discussed challenges with the public interface with Borough boards and committees. This happened recently with the Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee meeting, and it is also happening currently with another committee [carefully not named, but note the heading "public interaction with advisory committees": the only "advisory committee" in Franklin Park was the TAC] that is being dominated by a few residents. As a result, there is not a true representation for all residents of the Borough.
Interesting how Parks can be fascinated by whatever Verizon has to say, but finds input from those of us whose property values would be destroyed to be such a nuisance that, as he went on to say:
Mr. Parks and Mr. Myslinski [Verizon’s other main crony on the TAC] will sit down with the committee that is currently having an issue and have a discussion.
But what were the residents so emphatic about? The pre-meeting minutes carefully avoid mentioning it, but this was when PA Act 50 required (in a nutshell) that boroughs revisit their zoning. This would have been an ideal time to correct the 2018 mistake that allowed the golf course as a cell tower site. Cohen Law Group (hired by Franklin Park to handle the zoning revisions) had indeed proposed commonsense changes to the zoning that would have addressed the cell tower problem and prevented the cell tower from being built at the golf course. This, of course, was almost as much of an emergency for the old boys’ club as residents daring to challenge them, and the February 16th, 2022 pre-meeting (again, hidden away in a back room) noted that:
There was discussion regarding the scope of engagement of the Cohen Law Group by the North Hills COG to address small cell sites in municipal ordinances since Cohen had made amendments to the ordinance that were not requested. The Planning Commission tabled the matter until March when Crown [Crown Castle, another cell tower builder] will review the technology and how it works.
Needless to say, that meeting is where the proposed changes were buried, never to be heard from again. When Verizon wanted something, Borough Council went out of its way to make it happen, even elbowing residents out of the way. When those residents requested that the cell-tower zoning changes from 2018 be undone, Borough Council refused even to consider it. Instead, the Council buried that request in bureaucracy until it was dead.
The RJM Study
Finally, a bit of science...
The TAC was willing to listen to one argument from the residents: that without a formal study of cellphone signal strength, the discussion would not be profitable. Because of this, RJM Wireless was contracted in May of 2022 to analyze coverage and offer proposals.
After several months of delays, the results – for which Franklin Park paid RJM Wireless $24,000 – were presented at the closed-door pre-meeting on February 1st, 2023. Roughly an hour's worth of presentation and discussion were condensed into:
Bob Monfredi of RJM Wireless reviewed the summary report prepared following their analysis of wireless and radio coverage in the Borough, and he answered questions. He noted that coverage in the Borough is in the poor range, and he reviewed four possible options to address the coverage issues.
Requesting a copy of this report to read for myself, I was told that I was welcome to file a Right-to-Know request! (Once more, Borough Council and its "transparency"...) I did file a request, and on February 7th I did receive a copy of the report. The study, which has since been very quietly posted on the Franklin Park website, revealed that while putting a giant cell tower at the golf course would improve cell coverage, there are several other ways to improve it without doing so.
Here’s a clue about how much Borough Council would like you to know about the results of that $24,000 study: go to the Borough website and try to find it without using the search engine. You might try clicking “News,” but as of March 2024 – over a year after the meeting – that won’t take you there. It is on the website, but can only be located via the search bar – and thus only by people who were already looking specifically for it.
This is the Borough Council’s idea of “transparency.”
The Result
In which the old boys' club reverts to form.
Borough Council returned to its playbook of secret surprise meetings: while the borough website advertised Thursday, March 2nd, 2023 as the date for the March TAC meeting, no TAC meeting took place that day. Rather, hidden in the agenda for a Borough Council work session on March 1st – the day before the TAC meeting was scheduled – was the announcement that a "technology committee" meeting would take place directly before the work session. No agenda was ever published for it, again in violation of the Sunshine Law.
We can, however, draw conclusions from John Parks’ actions at the February 15th, 2023 pre-meeting, where the Council switched gears from the Technology Advisory Committee to the “Council Technology Committee.” As the minutes put it:
Mr. Parks asked Mr. Myslinski and Mr. Schwartzmier to join the Committee to deal with the communications issue in the Borough on a rapid basis because it is a critical safety issue. We need to expedite the process to make a decision on the recommendations regarding cell towers and small cells. He has asked Mr. Ebner and the Committee to focus on this matter and quickly get deeply involved in resolving the issue. Mr. Parks asked Mr. Ebner to immediately contact all cell tower companies and provide information to the Committee.
In other words: now that we have an expensive study documenting that we don’t need a cell tower at the golf course to improve cell service or two-way radio reception, Parks and Myslinski feel that it is now a “critical safety issue” to build it immediately.