OTISFIELD — The Friends of Scribner Hill vowed Tuesday night to continue its fight in court, after the Planning Board denied them a voice during a court-ordered fact-finding meeting on a proposed telecommunications tower on Scribner Hill.

“We’ll fight it as far as we need to fight,” said John Poto who jumped up from his seat in the crowded Otisfield Community Hall just seconds after the board adjourned around 9:30 p.m. He asked people to remain so he and others could be heard.

The meeting was to satisfy a “findings of fact and conclusions of law” mandate by Oxford Superior Court Justice Robert Clifford to back up the board’s approval of a permit application for U.S. Cellular to build the tower.

On July 9, The Friends of Scribner Hill and individual plaintiffs Poto, James Gregory, Kristin Roy and Joseph Brown, attempted to have the court remand the permit decision back to the Planning Board for a full hearing in order to air its own concerns about the project.

The town has conceded it may have failed to properly notify all the abutters during previous public hearings on the project.

But in his decision, Clifford left it up to the board to decide if it should reopen the record Tuesday to gather more evidence from abutters.

After two and one-half hours of fact-finding, the board chose to adjourn the meeting instead of allowing public comment as requested by Poto many times. In a July 25 letter, Poto implored the board to hear evidence from the people who will be most affected by the project.

“I’m going to ask you to do the right thing one more time, reopen the hearing and let’s share all the knowledge we’ve gained, work with each other rather than against and end up with a tower that is best for the town of Otisfield and for all its residents, especially those who will be directly impacted by this decision,” Poto said it his letter.

He told the board Tuesday night that it held the “key” to ending the controversy by simply allowing opponents to provide their own findings on the record.

“If you don’t, it doesn’t go away in court,” Poto, a former member of the Planning Board, said.

“At what point do we tell the selectmen to stop spending our money?” he asked, referring to the ongoing litigation.

One alternate Planning Board member, Beth Damon, walked out as Poto began to speak while the five Planning Board members, one other alternate, Code Enforcement Officer Richard St. John, U.S. cellular representatives and two selectmen stayed to listen until the scene erupted into a shouting match between St. John and James Gregory, a Scribner Hill Road resident.

“No one’s taking away from our dreams,” Gregory told St. John as Planning Board members got up to leave the hall.

Section 5.2 of the town’s wireless communication ordinance requires the Planning Board to make written findings on whether the tower complies with the telecommunications ordinance. Although minutes of the hearings and meetings from last year and earlier this year were taken, there were apparently no official findings of fact made.

During Tuesday’s meeting, dozens of findings of fact and conclusions of laws were set down to prove the facts the Planning Board used to make its Jan. 17 decision to approve the tower application and the conclusions of law reached regarding those facts.

The 13-page telecommunications ordinance, approved by town meeting in 1999, lays out everything from the application requirements to documentation on whether the project has any adverse affect on scenic resources, historic resources, tower color, landscaping and many other items.

To meet the court-mandated requirement, the Planning Board had to review each section, line by line, and determine whether they had met that requirement or not and state how it was met.

For example, when finding the project had no adverse impact on designated scenic resources, the board members had to find that was a fact and then state they determined that fact by looking at photos which superimposed the tower and by other documentation.

“In looking at them (photographs) we determined yes we saw it (the cell tower), but the impact wasn’t negative to any great degree,” Planning Board member Karen Turino said.

The board is set to meet at 7 p.m. Aug. 21 in the Otisfield Town Hall to review and approve the final facts of findings and conclusions of law that will be written up by the town’s attorney, Phil Saucier.

Town officials will return to Oxford County Superior Court in Paris and ask the judge to rule on the thoroughness of the process in an attempt to prevent the plaintiffs from coming back with another lawsuit. Meanwhile the court retains jurisdiction of the matter.

The tower, which was set to start construction in June and take five weeks to complete, will accommodate space for other cellular companies and the Otisfield Fire Department’s communication equipment.

Kelly Matzen, an attorney for U.S. Cellular, said after Tuesday’s meeting that St. John had issued the company a building permit so it was ready to begin construction at the conclusion of the court case. However, the company gave it back recently so as not to “muddy the water” should any further legal action be at hand, he said.

ldixon@sunjournal.com

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