By David Rogers. BLOWING ROCK, N.C. — After a roughly 90-minute meeting in closed session following the regular meeting of town council on April 8, the Blowing Rock Board of Commissioners came back into open session and unanimously voted for the town to purchase 8.6 acres of land near the Blowing Rock Conference Center. The stated purpose of the land acquisition is to help strengthen town infrastructure and other potential uses still in the talking stages.
It is worth noting that the subject property is at one of the higher elevations within the town limits. At this point, since there has been no open discussion by the town council members, we can only speculate on the potential uses of the newly acquired real estate.
What Needs?
Recent history suggests Blowing Rock has two critical needs that can be addressed by purchase of elevated land within the town limits: [1] improved communications and [2] reserve water storage facilities to feed the town’s gravity-powered system.
Both concerns were highlighted last year during a contentious special meeting of Town Council, on July 23. That session focused on a need to raise the communications utility pole on Green Hill Circle an additional 20-feet so that the VHF radio signals (which require clear line of sight) could be sent above the tree canopy. With the growth of the trees over the years, those critical communication transmissions are degraded by line-of-sight interference from the tree canopy, according to testimony by town officials, including emergency services and public works personnel.
While everyone agreed that good communications among law enforcement, firefighting and public works personnel is important, the sticking points were how best to achieve that objective and at what cost.
Several Green Hill Circle residents took a “not in our backyard” approach and hired attorney Nathan Miller to argue against a taller utility pole. Despite a Planning Board recommendation to go forward with raising the utility pole, the board of commissioners opted to table any decision and asked for a more comprehensive study of potential communications upgrades, “… to bring Blowing Rock into the 21st century” and not dependent on old technology.
What also surfaced during those discussions were concerns about the municipality’s sole dependence on the 3-million-gallon water storage tank that powers the gravity-fed system for the entire town. Since the new land acquisition is elevated, the board of commissioners might also consider installation of a prospectively smaller tank for reserve storage in the event the main tank goes offline for any reason. According to an earlier report by town manager Shane Fox at the town council’s Winter Retreat, Blowing Rock (on average) uses approximately 500,000 gallons of water per day.
Expanding Communications Flexibility
As for the communication needs, selecting a town-owned site other than Green Hill Circle opens a number of possibilities, including potential partnerships with both government and corporate entities in efforts to improve emergency communications regionally, as well as locally, and perhaps improve what has been much-criticized, inadequate cell phone service in Blowing Rock and its immediately surrounding areas.
A logical communications partner would be Watauga County as it seeks to improve emergency communications throughout the wider jurisdiction. At its April 1 meeting, the Watauga County Board of Commissioners approved a $621,460 contract with Engineering Tower Solutions (Raleigh, https://ets-pllc.com/) to perform civil, engineering, and tower assessment work across seven tower sites.
The approved contract is part of the county’s ongoing, radio infrastructure upgraded for public safety. While a Blowing Rock site was not part of that funding contract, the county has previously expressed interest in having a communications tower in town to provide enhanced emergency services coverage in the southern end of the county. While those earlier talks centered on the town-owned land in the middle of Green Hill Circle, next to the water storage tank (a proposal rebuffed by neighboring property owners), a reasonable focus now might well be on the site of the new property acquisition if the two government bodies can reach agreement.
In a phone interview, the Emergency Services Director for Watauga County, Will Holt, stated that his department has not been involved in any discussions with the Town of Blowing Rock about the new potential site, but certainly they want to serve the people of Blowing Rock in any way they can. In regard to all of the other towers in the county, Holt said the county is licensed to go up to, but not exceed 199 feet in height.
By partnering with Watauga County, that also implies a collaboration with the North Carolina Department of Public Safety (DPS), which stepped up its Voice Interoperability Plan for Emergency Responders (“VIPER”) after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. As reported on the DPS website, interoperable communications were identified by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1995 as a critical need for public safety agencies when responding to emergencies.
The National Task Force on Interoperability defines interoperability as “… the ability of public safety agencies to talk to one another via radio communication systems — to exchange voice and/or data with one another on demand, in real time, when needed,” according to DPS.
Holt suggested that Watauga County and the NC Department of Public Safety are “joined at the hip” in delivering VIPER communications services.
Possible Commercial Partnerships?
While assurances were made at the July 23 special meeting of Blowing Rock town council that allowing cell phone companies to use the Green Hill Circle utility pole was not a consideration and would require an entirely different action by the board of commissioners if proposed, any new communications tower on the 8.6 acres of property would certainly be an inviting presence for one or more corporate vendors of cell phone service, such as Verizon, Spectrum, T-Mobile, AT&T, Carolina West Wireless, xfinity mobile or others.
go with an up to date system vhf and uhf are extremely outdated