Notes From the Sauk County Communications Infrastructure (CIC) Meeting in Spring Green on September 1, 2004 by Mark Culverhouse.

I took the day off from work to attend this meeting. It was well attended by at least 20 residents and another dozen or so police and firemen who drove infrom the surrounding communities. The committee allowed each person to speak up to 2 minutes each.
Mark Cupp, Executive Director of the Riverway Board, was on the agenda for this meeting. However, at the start of the meeting Tommy Lee Bychinski who chaired the meeting, informed Mr. Cupp that he would be limited to speaking only two minutes. Mr. Cupp stated that he had prepared remarks, and reminded the committee that they had invited him to speak at the meeting and requested enough time to read his prepared remarks. The committee chair then said that he would allow Mr. Cupp five minutes to speak. Mr. Cupp spoke about how people today can canoe down 92 miles of the Lower Wisconsin River and experience what the French explorers Marquette and Joliet did when they traveled here in 1673. (We should all be proud of the efforts being made by so many people to protect our beautiful river and our heritage for generations to come. Mark Cupp is the first and only Executive Director of the LWSRB since being appointed in January 1990. He has demonstrated exceptional integrity and leadership as a public servant. It would have been nice if he had been treated with a little more respect.)
I spoke for two minutes and discussed how an alternative high-speed wireless Internet network would provide an economic benefit for every person in the county as well as be used by emergency services.
Many residents stated that they wanted the committee to work with the Riverway Board to move the tower away from the river.
Almost every policeman and fireman who spoke stated the same thing - that the current problem is with pagers. I also attended a CIC presentation at the Loganville fire station the night before, August 31, 2004. At that meeting Tim Stieve placed two pagers on the table. One was a very small pager with no visible antenna. The other pager was larger with an 8 inch antenna on the top. Phil the engineer stated that the larger pager with the antenna worked better than the small pagers with an internal coiled antenna. At both meetings they mentioned that first responders working at Cardinal Glass had problems getting pages. ($6,000,000 is a lot to pay just to be able to able to use a tiny pager.)

Sauk County Spends $825 to Re-take the Photo on our Web Site! Compare the two photos below for yourself!
Tim Stieve mentioned that he thought the picture on our MoveTheTower home page that has the tower drawn in was inaccurate. He then stated that last week he, Phil the CIC communications engineer, Guy Matthews a dive team member, and a consultant from Ramaker & Associates consulting engineering firm spent three hours on the river. They took pictures in the direction of the Thuli Road tower and paid Ramaker & Associates to draw a line on the photo to represent the tower. They showed our picture and their picture, and both pictures looked exactly the same! I asked Tim how much it cost the county for contracting Ramaker & Associates. He replied, "$600".

<-- Our "Famous" Home Page photo.

See Sauk County's $600 photo below.

<-- County's $600 Photo trying to prove our photo is "not visually correct"

<-- Legend at bottom of Ramaker photo: "Rendering #3 (Zoomed to match "Move The Tower" rending - not visually correct)"

The tower location is at the end of Thuli Road right at the base of the bluffs. At one point Phil the engineer stated that "the farther away from the bluff that the tower is moved, the better the coverage". Later, I stated that moving the tower away from the bluff, moves it closer to Spring Green, which gives it an unobstructed view of the Lone Rock Airport to the west and the Troy Village bluff near Badger Road to the east. Phil then stated, "Nothing would make me happier than to be able to move the tower to downtown Spring Green". As mentioned in my Letter to the Editor of the Home News, the original proposed site by the CIC was west of Spring Green on Kennedy Road. How ironic that all of the residents who spoke against the tower location next to the river, were also advocating moving the tower to Spring Green, perhaps putting on top of the water tower! The engineer and supporters of the Riverway want it one place, the supervisors want it somewhere else.
Tim Stieve, the CIC administrator, spent a long time making the case that two towers would cost more than one tower and that there were problems putting the antennas on the Spring Green water tower, including the US Cellular antennas already there. He passed around a letter from US Cellular saying that they did not want the county's antennas on the tower with theirs. However, Don Greenwood, member of the Spring Green Village Board stated that US Cellular does not have an exclusive contract to use the village's water tower.
At one point CIC member Tommy Lee Bychinski stated that our web site was incorrect in stating that the project would cost $6,000,000. Another member of the committee stated that the correct number was $5,300,000. The $6,000,000 figure used on our web site can be found on the Sauk County web site in the minutes of the Management Information Systems meeting where they estimated the project would cost between $4,000,000 - $6,000,000. Also, the CIC has not even finalized their design of the network, so their final costs are not yet known. Also, in the Home News on August 25, 2004 on page 6 in an article entitled, "Tower Project Costs Also Challenged", it states, "During the board's discussion supervisor Marty Krueger expressed concern about the rising cost of the project and pressed for an estimate on the total cost of the project. The project according to Krueger, is already over original budget estimates."