A Letter to the Editor by Bart Olson - published in various Sauk County newspapers in the week of December 1, 2004:

It has come to my attention that the Sauk County Communications Infrastructure Committee (CIC) is attempting to exempt itself (the county) from the county's own Tower Siting Ordinance (Chapter 23). As some of you may know, I was a supervisor from 1996-2000 and served on the planning and zoning committee and also a special committee that studied communication towers and drafted legislation that eventually became Sauk County's Tower Siting Ordinance, which was adopted on July 20, 1999.

The primary reason the county revised its policy on communication towers in 1999 was due to public pressure to limit the growth of towers as they are unattractive and tend to devalue surrounding property values especially homes and residential lots. We tried to resolve the issue in three ways:

1. Not allowing new towers if an existing tower space can be rented by the applicant. No tower could be applied for unless the applicant had proved adequate space was not available on existing facilities.

2. A tower had to be set back at least five times the height of the tower from an adjoining property line. An applicant could obtain a waiver from adjacent property owners if he wished. It was assumed a waiver would cost about as much as the loss of value to the adjoining owners' property.

Since then the ordinance has been amended twice: In December 1999 (23.03) to prevent townships from enacting their own ordinances and in February 2000 (23.04d) to exempt State of Wisconsin towers, and (28.08(2)) to reduce the distance from adjacent properties to two times the tower height instead of 5 times.

In my opinion, the original ordinance has been just about gutted due to changes over the years but this latest move by the CIC will totally make a complete joke of it. Just put yourself in the shoes of someone who owns a home or building lot and then the county builds its own tower next door and the value of your property drops to half or even less and there is nothing you can do about it. So much for protecting the citizens of Sauk County.

In my opinion, the CIC has gone from a committee that was appointed to replace the current county communications system in the most cost effective way to a committee bent on putting the county into the communications business, i.e. tower rental, fiber transport, telephone service and possibly wireless internet service. On September 21, 2004 according to the county's web site CIC's consultant proposed a $62 million dollar wireless internet system featuring 8,400 antennas to the CIC for them to consider. Imagine county taxpayers footing the bill for a $62 million dollar internet system with 8,400 antennas. Are these guys out of control or what?

The county does not need to build and own all of its towers. If communication towers or municipal water towers are available to attach antennas to, the county should use them. Rented tower space works just as well as placing an antenna on your own tower but it is a lot cheaper. Interconnecting the towers with telephone lines is also substantially cheaper than plowing in and maintaining your own $3 million dollar fiber optic network. The Village of Merrimac has offered the county space on their water tower but I suspect the county doesn't want to do that because they want to be in the tower rental business throughout the county themselves and in direct competition with all the municipalities who have towers.

The CIC wants to exempt the county from the tower ordinance otherwise they will probably have to attach some of their antennas to someone else's tower or may have to pay some poor Sauk County property owner for a waiver in order to construct a new tower.

The county should not be exempted from its own ordinance; it should play by its own rules. It's not fair to the adjacent property owners who will not be compensated for their losses, the other private and municipal tower owners who have to compete with the county for customers or the citizens who originally complained about too many towers ruining the Sauk County skyline. The CIC should get back to focusing on fixing the county's radio system and stop trying to get county taxpayers to foot the bill for an expensive and potentially illegal big government adventure in various communications businesses.