Village Board discusses police car, block grant and 5G wireless

MILLERTON — Between the various reports brought to its attention on Monday, Dec. 14, the Village Board was kept informed by the Millerton Police Department, the latest research on 5G wireless and a few updates on the village’s preparations for the future. 

The full board was in attendance and the meeting was live streamed to the “Village of Millerton VOM” Facebook page due to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

As an update on the police force’s new vehicle, Millerton Police Officer in Charge Michael Veeder reported that the last news he heard was that the new vehicle went on the assembly line on Sunday, Nov. 8. Once the vehicle’s off the assembly line, he said it’s going to go to The Cruisers Division to be outfitted and that the Millerton Police will be notified when it’s fully outfitted.

Raising the village’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) application for discussion, Trustee Alicia Sartori reminded the board that it had asked for $150,000 for sidewalk replacement work in the village. Totaling an estimated 600 linear square feet of sidewalk, she said the village will do as much work as it can for the money. Though the board initially talked about how many grants it has available and how much in matching funds it would have to come up with, Sartori explained the block grant is not a matching grant.

The future of 5G

Sharing his exploration into 5G wireless with the board, Trustee Matthew Hartzog reported that the company SpaceX is planning to launch 12,000 internet satellites into space that will be beaming down 5G technology. If the village were to sign up with the company’s subscription service Spacelink, he said the technology wouldn’t be dependent on fiber optic cable. 

Hartzog noted that it would still be the same 5G setup where there would be an extension added on possibly every other telephone pole. Describing the extension as being about as thick as the telephone pole and about 21 or 24 inches high, Hartzog said it will look like an extension of the telephone pole and believes it would essentially blend in. What he is still trying to research, he explained, is whether there might be a very large tower that would be feeding the information to all of the smaller towers. In response to a question from Mayor Debbie Middlebrook, he said all of the systems are going to work off the extension.

If the village wants to somehow manage what the extensions would look like, Middlebrook considered that they’d have to add it to their zoning code, and Hartzog agreed that the village needs to have zoning regulations in place if it wants the extension. Having attended a 5G webinar with fellow Trustee Joshua Schultz, Hartzog observed that towns that have “very nice, fancy telephone poles” didn’t want something foreign and alien-looking, adding that the towns had a way to taper what the extension was going to look like. To date, he said he believed the village of Millerton has about four or five “really nice telephone poles” on Dutchess Avenue by the location of the Millerton Farmers Market; the rest, he said, are “kind of standard.” 

Furthermore, Hartzog said he wasn’t sure if the extension was going to be one per broadcasting telephone pole or every fourth telephone pole. Attempting to describe the extension, he said it would involve a box not the size of a large suitcase, but the next size down.

“Well, I think this is something we should take up in January,” Middlebrook said, adding that the board could discuss its thoughts on what it might want to have in the village, especially in the village’s historic district, and what the historic district allows and doesn’t allow.

Hartzog said he hasn’t yet found out whether the village’s water tower could be used as its big tower if and when Millerton gets 5G.

For his report, Schultz informed the board that it should have a draft version of the emergency operation plan. With the exception of some additions and items listed in his footnotes, he said the main body of the document is mostly done and that the village is definitely in the homestretch. 

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