School board to hang up on cell tower proposal
BY CHRIS GAETANO Staff Writer

EDISON - Facing massive public opposition, the Edison Board of Education decided to kill a proposal that would have built a cell tower 200 feet from Martin Luther King Elementary School. The decision was made during the board's Nov. 15 meeting.

The decision came after Board President David Dickinson attended a meeting of the MLK School PTA, which was attended by 150 to 200 people, all packed into the school's large multipurpose room. During that meeting, which took place on Oct. 30, the assembled crowd had expressed its uniform opposition to the idea of a cell tower so close to school grounds, based mostly on health concerns.

According to Dickinson, the district put the 120-foot-tall tower out to bid in September, but ultimately rejected the initial offering from telecommunications firm Omnipoint because the structure did not meet specifications. Had the bid been accepted, it would have yielded about $35,000 per year for the district. According to Councilman Robert Karabinchak, Omnipoint had first approached the township Zoning Board in 2005. Karabinchak, who was sitting on Zoning Board at the time, said that he had fought the application tooth and nail, but that the courts eventually forced the township to accept the project. He noted that this was the pattern with every cell phone tower the board denied. This was when the possibility of using the cell tower to generate extra revenue was first examined.

Dickinson said that it would be irresponsible for the board to enact things that so many members of the public are against. With this in mind, he recommended that the board not approve the construction of a cell tower at MLK School.

"It would be my recommendation that we simply just abandon [the proposal], based on the response of the people that were there. It's not a battle that we need to fight. They feel very strongly about it, and when there's that many people that feel that strongly about it, we have an obligation to listen to them, so I think we should, on Monday's [Nov. 19] meeting, just kill the cell tower," said Dickinson.

He then asked whether there was anyone on the board opposed to this idea. Silence was the reply.

"All right," said Dickinson. He said that an official resolution should be drawn up to finalize the decision.

Allyson McCarthy, president of the MLK School PTA, was pleased with the board's decision but said she would like to see an official board policy prohibiting cell phones from all school property.

"We're absolutely thrilled," McCarthy said. "We're just hoping the resolution will prohibit the building of cell towers on all school property in all of Edison, so that's what we're going to be watching now, to make sure the resolution includes all the schools. Obviously, we're very, very happy that the board has decided to not go down that road."