Stop wasting time and shelve the tower plan
A 970-foot
communications tower on Cudjoe Key makes about as much sense as the U.S.
Air Force firing missiles over the protected waters of the Florida Keys
National Marine Sanctuary.
Believe it or not,
Cudjoe Key residents and environmentalists have had to fight back both
proposals in the past decade.
In the case of the
tower, residents thought they had defeated the plan in 2000, and even
persuaded county commissioners to pass a 330-foot height restriction for
future towers.
But last month, back
came local attorney David Paul Horan, representing Industrial
Communications, which wants to build the tower. Horan offered to settle
a civil suit filed by the company if the county allowed the tower to be
constructed. The company sued the county after it denied the tower in
2000, lost the first round in court and now is appealing.
In June, Horan made an
interesting argument that the Coast Guard needed the towers to meet
homeland security requirements, but somebody forgot to mention these
needs to the Coast Guard.
The county commission
gave Horan a month to gather up some proof that the Coast Guard did, in
fact, need those towers.
When Horan came back
to the county commission last week, he had the same story.
But at the meeting was
Coast Guard Cmdr. Jim Fitton, deputy group commander in Key West, who
said the Coast Guard had not made any commitments to use private towers
for its communications.
Commissioners
unanimously voted down Horan's proposal.
In the late '70s and
early '80s, Horan was brilliant in his representation of the late
treasure salvager Mel Fisher, who battled all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court for rights to bring up treasure from the sunken Spanish
galleon Atocha.
His arguments for
Industrial Communications last week definitely were not of the same
standard.
Environmentalists and
nearby residents turned out to explain — once again — that a tower
nearly the height of the Eiffel Tower had no place in the path of bird
migrations, crystal clear skies ideal for astronomers and within a
stone's throw of calm, shallow waters that draw thousands of kayakers
and other nature lovers every year.
Horan responded that
birds must have "some kind of death wish" to fly in the dark, when they
would be at risk of crashing into the tower.
They'd also have a
death wish to fly into missiles blasting off from a pad at the end of
Blimp Road on Cudjoe Key, but that doesn't make it wrong for those birds
to be there and for us to try to protect them.
When the U.S. Air
Force said they wanted to build a missile pad near that environmentally
fragile area in the late 1990s, residents filled meeting rooms to oppose
the plan. Military planners said the spot was perfect for conducting
training operations in the Gulf of Mexico between the Keys and Eglin Air
Force Base in the Panhandle.
There was little doubt
then that the noise and debris would disrupt the peace and balance of
nature on Cudjoe, and the proposal was filed away somewhere on a shelf
in some government office.
That's just where this
proposal for a massive tower should be today — filed away on a shelf,
stamped "do not revive."
— The Citizen |
