Section News:
From Tom, K5RC:
On Tuesday, 6/7, the Storey County Commissioners voted 3-0 to completely deny the Special Use Permit application of Tom and Midge Taormina filed in December 2010. The SUP requested that building permits for two monopoles of 120’ and 195’ be reinstated and that the four existing towers greater than 45’ in height be permitted. In their ruling, the Commissioners ordered that all four existing towers of 85’, 110’, 140’ and 140’ be dismantled within 60 days and only the two towers of 32’ and 40’ remain as permitted.
The SUP hearing came nearly three years after the County posted a Stop Work Order on the construction of the two monopoles and withdrew approval for existing towers dating back to 1997. Since 2008, the County has succumb to the pressures of a handful of residents who attribute the decline in housing prices to the towers at the Taormina residence, which is on ten acres of open range. The most vocal of the dissenters purchased their land and built their homes after many of the towers were already in place. Such claims have never been validated as accurate and Nevada law does not allow for protected views.
After months of fruitless efforts to negotiate with the DA of the County in 2008, a lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court to compel the county to reasonably accommodate the antennas in accordance with PRB-1 and a host of legal precedence’s in similar cases. After another year, the judge ruled that the Taormina’s had not exhausted their remedies through the County’s SUP process and declined to act pending the outcome of that procedure. The judge also ordered the County to negotiate in good faith with the applicants. By failing to negotiate a compromise for five towers offered by the applicants and by failing to reasonably accommodate through the SUP process, the County knowingly has forced this matter back into the hands of the Federal judge.
The County Planning Committee had forwarded a recommended approval of the SUP for the existing towers to the Commissioners. The Building Department wrote a staff report for the Commissioners recommending approval of the SUP. In recent days, the County Manager and (the new) DA recommended the Commissioners adopt the five-tower compromise proposed by Taormina. They did not follow any of the recommendations and instead drafted their own opinion to deny and voted on it unanimously.
Lead attorney, Fred Hopengarten, K1VR, has secured a non-enforcement agreement which will be codified in the immediate future. This will keep the status quo until the very expensive and time-consuming federal litigation is drafted and filed. By failing to follow the orders of the Federal judge to negotiate in good faith and since they did not, by any definition, reasonably accommodate the needs of the applicants, attorney Hopengarten is optimistic of a favorable outcome, but that may be another year in the future. The extreme precedent set by the County Commission has far reaching implications for hams across the US and it will not be left unchallenged.
For 14 years, Tom, K5RC and Midge, K7AFO have lived at the Comstock Memorial Station, W7RN, outside Virginia City, NV. Tom is the ARES EC of Storey County.
Tom Taormina, K5RC
Virginia City NV
The Comstock Memorial Station – W7RN