SCARBOROUGH – Citing concerns related to the health and welfare of town residents, the group Scarborough Families for the Responsible Placement of Cell Towers is now attempting to overturn new rules governing cell towers that were approved by the Town Council last week.

The new rules were adopted in a 4-3 vote on Oct. 15, with councilors James Benedict, Ed Blaise and Kate St. Clair opposed. After the meeting, Council Chairman Richard Sullivan told the Current that he felt the council had “negotiated a compromise in good faith.”

That’s one of the reasons he’s disappointed that the anti-cell tower group has declared its intention to gather signatures to force a referendum on overturning the new rules before there has been an opportunity to see how they’ll work.

The new rules set up a hierarchy for the placement of cell towers and in the first instance require providers to co-locate on existing towers before making a request to build a new tower. The new rules also specify that the preferred location for any new tower would be in the town’s industrial zones.

However, the new rules also create several Transmission Tower Overlay Districts – located off Black Point Road, south of Pine Point Road on the border with Old Orchard Beach, and in the Sawyer and Payne road area and west of the Turnpike. Some of the parcels included in the overlay districts are owned by the state or the Scarborough Land Trust.

In all, Sullivan said the new rules provide better protection than the old rules governing the placement of cell towers and that the council did listen to the objections about keeping cell towers away from residential neighborhoods. In addition, he said the new rules give the Planning Board quite a bit of discretion in reviewing applications for new cell towers.

But Suzanne Foley-Ferguson, a former town councilor and one of the most outspoken members of Scarborough Families for the Responsible Placement of Cell Towers, feels the new rules were rushed through, without proper consideration and argued this week that the council had a “getting-it-done, instead of a getting-it-right, attitude.”

Town Clerk Yolande Justice said the anti-cell tower group has until the close of business on Nov. 4 to submit the signatures of at least 2,379 registered voters. Justice said the petition question she worked out with Foley-Ferguson asks residents if they approve of the amendments made to the town’s ordinances regarding the placement of cell towers.

Justice said her office would have 10 days to certify the signatures once the petitions are turned in and if the minimum number of signatures are certified, the Town Council would then have to set a special election within 30 days.

Sullivan feels the new rules governing cell towers are a “reasonable solution” and said, “I don’t know what else we could have done. We have been out night after night on this, and four of the councilors felt we had gone as far as we could go.”

He added, “It’s hard to understand the objections. It’s not realistic to ban all cell towers, and we did our best to keep them out of residential areas and to notify abutters when an application comes in.”

“We’ve given the Planning Board tons of tools, and a lot of thought and effort” has gone into drafting the new rules, Sullivan said. “I think this is a better ordinance, and it has a lot of restrictions on what can be done.”

Sullivan said he respects the right of residents to disagree with his analysis, but also said that providing better cellular telephone and wireless data coverage has been something that people in town have been requesting for a long time.

While Foley-Ferguson said that “there are good things about (the new cell tower rules), we object to the four town councilors pushing this to be completed by the election.”

She added, “Another huge thing that we object to is that the Town Council hired a consultant, upon the recommendation of Verizon Wireless, to tell us where we have bad coverage. And four of the seven councilors relied on his maps to make their decision.”

Foley-Ferguson said her group has proven that, at least on the east side of the Maine Turnpike, the consultant’s coverage gap maps are incorrect. She also said that in 2011 the World Health Organization classified radio frequency emissions as a possible carcinogen.

“Because of that our leaders should be taking precautions in the siting of all wireless antenna,” she said.

Foley-Ferguson added, “We agree with Councilor Ed Blaise when he said that our first responsibility is to the health and welfare of the residents than to improving coverage. That is exactly our point.”

She said the anti-cell tower group does not object to the hierarchy for the placement of new cell towers, but felt there “was little time to discuss how this stepped approach might be implemented in reality.”

Scarborough Families for the Responsible Placement of Cell Towers is also unhappy with the creation of the overlay districts and an allowance for so-called “stealth towers” to be placed on buildings or structures in 21 of Scarborough’s 25 zoning districts.

In all, Foley-Ferguson said it’s important to overturn the new cell tower rules because they are “(simply) not good enough, the overlay (districts) are too broad and the Town Council needs to work on this more.”

She added that, “Siting of towers needs to be done with a more thorough and deliberate approach, tower by tower” and argued that there was not enough transparency in creating the new cell tower rules.

Overall, she said, what Scarborough Families for the Responsible Placement of Cell Towers wants is for the town to hire an unbiased consultant, consider increasing the height of towers in the industrial and commercial zones, create a mandate for co-location and create a ban on stealth towers.