Disclosure: Visionary Broadband advertises on the Pagosa Daily Post.
On Monday, November 2, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners — Steve Wadley, Ronnie Maez and Alvin Schaaf — considered four land use applications from Visionary Broadband, to place new communications towers in four locations. Because the applications each required ‘Conditional Use Permits’ the BOCC needed to conduct a public hearing and accept comments from the community.
One of the towers is proposed for a remote location at the Archuleta County-Hinsdale County border. The other three towers are slated for the Alpha Rockridge subdivision, an area north of Lake Hatcher, and at the County Road and Bridge offices on Highway 84.
The BOCC has been consistently supportive of expanding broadband access in the county.
From the Visionary Broadband website:
Visionary is a pioneering ISP [Internet Service Provider] in Wyoming, having started business in December of 1994.
Founded in a basement, Visionary has grown to become the largest and most geographically diverse ISP in a three state region, providing more than 20,000 customers with Internet access via dialup, wireless, DSL, T1 and fiber…
In 2013, Visionary acquired the VailNet operations in Avon, Vail and Summit County, expanding our presence to the Western slope of Colorado. VailNet was the first company to roll out DSL services in Vail Valley and Summit County, and we’re happy to continue that heritage. Visionary also purchased an operation in Steamboat Springs, Colorado in 2014, and developed that location into a platform for a redundant, diverse route out of Steamboat. This included lighting dark fiber to Craig, Colorado and ultimately Denver, Colorado…
In 2017, Visionary merged with SkyWerx Internet, a family-run business that has been providing wireless internet in Pagosa Springs and Durango since 2003. SkyWerx was founded by brothers Justin and Jered Davis, and eventually expanded to serve customers in Southwest Colorado to the New Mexico border.
SkyWerx was named ‘Business of the Year’ by the Pagosa Springs Chamber of Commerce in 2014 and one of ’50 Colorado Companies to Watch’ in 2014 by Biz Magazine.
Justin Davis represented Visionary at the public hearing.
Prior to the public hearing, County Attorney Todd Weaver reminded the commissioners that federal law prohibits local government boards from considering the reportedly harmful effects of radio frequency (RF) radiation when ruling on new radio tower locations. The federal government claims that the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) has thoroughly studied the health effects of RF radiation, and given its stamp of approval to each of the technologies that have rolled out over the past couple of decades.
Some local citizens, nevertheless, stepped up to the podium to protest the general trend of new communications towers going up in Archuleta County. Some of the comments were related to the new 5G technology, although Visionary Broadband does not (to my knowledge) use that particular technology currently. It’s possible, however, that space on the towers will eventually be rented by other companies.
One speaker, who goes by the single name of Zhena, noted that the BOCC has, for many years, been allowing the production and sale of marijuana, contrary to federal regulations. She wondered why the BOCC would not be willing to assert their authority to protect citizens from RF radiation, in opposition to the federal rules cited by attorney Weaver.
Three residents of the Alpha Rockridge subdivision protested the location of that proposed tower, also citing threats to public health in the surrounding neighborhood.
The BOCC approved all four tower locations.
A 2019 investigative article in the New York Times, written by reporter William Broad, generally dismisses the view that the higher frequencies used by cell phone technology are actually less harmful than current technologies, because the higher frequency waves are more successfully blocked by the body’s skin covering. From that article:
The new cellphones are to employ a range of radio frequencies up to dozens of times higher than those Dr. Curry identified two decades ago as endangering student health. But mainstream scientists continue to see no evidence of harm from cellphone radio waves.
“If phones are linked to cancer, we’d expect to see a marked uptick,” David Robert Grimes, a cancer researcher at the University of Oxford, wrote recently in The Guardian. “Yet we do not.”
In a recent interview, Dr. Carpenter defended his high-frequency view. “You have all this evidence that cellphone radiation penetrates the brain,” he said. But he conceded after some discussion that the increasingly high frequencies could in fact have a difficult time entering the human body: “There’s some legitimacy to that point of view.”
You can read the full article here.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.