ORD-2006-086 - Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation (PEMC) Planned Development (PD-OI) and Special Use Permit, Class A

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right. I welcome all of you tonight for this public hearing. Who is here on behalf of the applicant? State your name please for the record. Robin Blanton: Good evening, I'm Robin Blanton with Piedmont EMC, and as you are aware, we have submitted an application to construct a 350-foot tower, and that would be the top of the antenna height on the tower. Geof Gledhill: Excuse me. I think that the testimony that this witness is likely to be next as to the legislative and the special use permit. I think you have to swear in and let him start over again ' ' At this time, the Clerk swore in aft speakers to this item. Robin Blanton: Again, I'm Robin Blanton with Piedmont EMC, and we have submitted an application to construct a 350-foot tower at our property on 2500 Highway 86 South. The reason we want to construct a taller tower is to improve our radio communication in our service territory. We have certain areas with our present radio system that we don't have good coverage, and this tower is part of the three towers within our service territory. There is one here in Hillsborough, we also have a tower that we are wanting to construct in Caswell County along Highway 62, and then another tower in Person County on Highway 158. This will greatly improve our radio communications in our entire service territory. What it will also allow us to do is to have three towers, and we have to have a trump system, so we have to have all three towers tied together. When we are in one area of the system, I can talk to someone in another area of the system just like we're side by side. What it does also is allow us to do data transfer between our three offices that we have in our service territory. At this point, if you have any questions, I'm willing to answer them, or if you want me to talk more about the technology, I'll go into that. Jay Bryan: Are there any questions from the Commissioners? None. Are there any questions from the Planning Board? Robin Blanton: The tower is 320 feet and then there will be a 30-foot high antenna on top of the tower so that it brings up to a 350-foot height. Judith Wegner: Could you speak to the issue of the migratory birds,, and if this is appropriate, and also about any adverse affects on people living nearby. Robin Blanton: We have looked at migratory birds patterns in this area, and from what we have found and also from the County staff, we haven't found any migratory bird patterns that would be affected by this. With our current tower, we have not seen any amount of birds under that existing tower. It is another 200 feet high. Judith Wegner: From what I understand from the materials, that by having a white rather than a red light, that makes a difference in terms of the birds. Robin Blanton: The prevailing philosophy right now is with the white lights on top of the towers, birds are less mesmerized by the flashing white light than they are the red light. We are trying to do that. One thing that would help with this tower is it is a self-supporting tower, so there will be no guide wires coming down from it, which are much more difficult to see. This should also help with the migratory bird patterns. Judith Wegner: Are there any adverse affects on the people living within the radius. Your materials talk about trying to shield visibility and things of that sort, but are there any other ways in which the emissions or the electronic transactions will make a difference. Robin Blanton: We will continue.... what we are doing is we are using basically the same frequencies that we have for our current radio system, which is the 150 megahertz range. There have been no studies suggesting that there are adverse health affects in those frequencies. Judith Wegner: And people who live further away, since it's a larger height, will this affect them?