To the Editor;
San Luis Valley residents continue to stand up against development and intrusion. Current battles against Wolf Creek ski area growth and Crestone gas drilling follow previous campaigns against military training overflights and groundwater exportation/exploitation. More recently, Villa Grove residents blocked a local contractor’s bid to operate a gravel pit near the town.
Currently, residents are gearing up to block Alltel’s bid to erect a tower on a county road to improve cell-phone coverage. Alltel sent a team of six PR people (hacks would be the less-polite word) to a preliminary meeting at the Villa Grove fire station, but their charts, photos, and patter failed to impress the handful of locals in attendance. One woman said she could live with spotty cell-phone coverage so long as the neighborhood retained its character, since neighbors could be expected to stop and lend a hand in the event of a vehicle breakdown. Others stressed the historic character of the neighborhood and concerns about human health and animal habitat. Doubts were voiced about the thoroughness of the company’s research and footwork and their lack of looking for other options such as doubling up with existing Verizon towers or locating in town or on the highway.
Locals also wondered whether this would be the first of a series of intrusions by Alltel and possibly other carriers in a mad dash to compete against more comprehensive service now provided by Verizon. I was reminded that just about five hundred years ago, Henry Hudson first sailed into what are now New York harbor and the Hudson River, finding majestic cliffs, scenic waterways, and pristine forests. Soon enough a turf battle ensued among different parties; roads, forts, docks, and housing were put in, all in the name of competitive commerce, and it’s been centuries since anyone could call the area scenic or pristine.
Nowadays, adventurers can’t just fire off their ship’s guns, flash their cutlasses, and take domain: we’ve got county commissions and federal commissions for oversight, but the feds can’t be counted on to put strong teeth into their restrictions if recent precedent is any clue. Look down from a vantage point on the side of the Sangres and you can see long skinny shadows across the face of the valley, caused by jet contrails interposed between earth and sun, vapors emitted in the name of commerce which surely don’t do much for our global atmosphere….
Nor do we expect those Alltel reps to suffer the side-effects of their proposed tower. Their synapses are probably long-since fried from excess exposure to transmissions and their senses dulled by living and working in technotopia–so I wouldn’t suggest anyone try to pick them up and shake some decency into them without the assistance of a nice long pair of insulated tongs.
It might be added that the opposition was mainly composed of landowners who can afford to live several miles off the highway corridor, and their complaints might have been largely mitigated if Alltel were to relocate the tower to the trashy zone where the less well-acreaged folks would be stuck with it. To make matters worse, if the first group of hacendados has enough leverage to shunt the tower to Villa Grove or elsewhere near the highway where us poor folks tend to live, Alltel may want a taller structure to compensate for a less advantageous location.
Bob Dylan famously wrote a lyric about putting uncouth and unwanted events “out on Highway 61,” and maybe its poetic justice that Saguache county road 61 has now been nominated for just such an item.
Slim Wolfe
Villa Grove,CO
