RESIDENTS on Comleroy Road protesting against the positioning of a new mobile phone tower have a week and a half to convince Telstra to put it somewhere else.
The group, featured on the front of the May 11 Gazette, met with Telstra and Servicestream representatives on site last Friday, May 20.
Resident Miranda Daly said the process was poorly managed from the start, when the address and phone numbers for public submissions on the proposed tower were wrong, with the contact person away as well. She said not all the residents within 100m had been informed either.
Ms Daly has also questioned the legality of putting a tower in a rural zone RU4, which does not name mobile phone towers as allowable within it.
While Telstra had sent a letter to residents on May 6 saying construction of the tower would begin on May 25, at the site meeting on May 20 Telstra reps said construction would begin in two weeks’ time.
“In a nutshell we were informed that Federal Government legislation has given Telstra open power to source and allocate sites anywhere, with the government meeting 50 per cent of costs,” she said. “To meet their contract agreement with the government, this site is where it will be. It just so happens they own this site already but they can effectively put them where they like to ‘fix the blackspots’.” Ms Daly said the Telstra reps admitted that “the site-predicted EME levels were most likely not correct due to the land undulation not accounted for”.
“Nor did these levels look at any other providers also utilising the tower, which we were told is inevitable. We are going to be sent new re-calculated levels. We were also informed that several [alternative] sites had been looked at. It appeared unclear where these were.
“They also admitted that their primary focus was to meet their side of the çontract. I asked if they could guarantee that health and property would not deteriorate and besides looking uncomfortable was told that no-one could or would guarantee this.”
