News Talk 94.1/AM 1600 Where The Upper Cumberland Talks
Dowelltown residents are pushing back against an effort to construct a cell phone tower on the site of Snow’s Hill Battlefield.
Amy Schwartz says people in the area were surprised when they discovered the build site along Lou Drive without receiving any notice.
“One day we woke up and there was somebody building a tower. We had no idea what it was,” Schwartz says. “We looked into it and we still couldn’t figure it out, there’d been nothing in the paper. Mike Antoniak, somebody who cares a lot about the natural beauty around here, he has been very vigilant and keeps his eye on the paper, [but] he hadn’t seen anything in the paper.”
Lucas Antoniak, a Dowelltown resident, says he and his father discovered errors in how NTCH-West TN Inc. – the company building the tower – sent their notice.
“In doing some research and calling the company, we found out that the company had filed the paper work and posted it in the wrong paper, a different county’s paper, over a year ago,” Antoniak says. “After we found that out, they posted it in our local paper and I started an online petition.”
The public notice was accidentally published in the Smith County Insider, rather than the Smithville Review. Schwartz says this isn’t the first time a public notice for a cell tower was published in the wrong newspaper.
“The same thing had just happened in Alexandria, which is our neighboring town,” Schwartz says. “We discovered that the reason why those people didn’t know, until there was a tower suddenly flashing its lights through their windows and their beautiful view they moved here to enjoy… that noticed had also been put in the wrong newspaper. So there was never an opportunity for the public to comment or weigh-in, which is our right.”
Antoniak says over 900 residents in and around Dowelltown have signed the petition to move the cell tower away from the Battlefield area. Nearly 840 people have signed the online petition alone, which Antoniak plans to leave open.
“After I posted the petition, we started hearing comments from people and they immediately were suspicious of the company posting in the wrong paper, but I don’t know if that was intentional or not,” Antoniak says. “The lower part of the valley was a battlefield in the Civil War. Up on the road of Snow’s Hill is the overlook for the valley, which I would say gets easily hundreds of people every year to stop and take pictures.”
Schwartz says the increased construction and presence of cell phone towers is something DeKalb County officials need to address as it may effect tourism numbers.
“People are coming here because they want to get away from all that stuff. It’s not because they want to have extra cell phone towers,” Schwartz says. “They’re coming here because it’s so beautiful here, it’s still pristine. Popping these things up willy-nilly all over the place because we don’t have zoning laws is really contrary to our goals which is to build an economy out here.”
The FCC has already placed a temporary hold on the cell tower’s construction after discovering NTCH’s publishing mistake. The window for public comments ends today. Petitioners ask residents concerned about the cell tower to contact NTCH-West TN Representative Joshua Austin at 803-466-6488.
