Dear Editor,
King Kong is coming to Green River, Wyoming. Union Wireless would like to erect an eighty-foot 5G tower in a lot immediately east of Ace Hardware. At a Planning and Zoning meeting June 9, this was discussed and somebody made the statement that, “It will be there, but nobody will see it.” According to images provided, it will be totally conspicuous for a good quarter mile around, and it will seem like a giant ape menacing everybody who lives, works, shops, or visits the area.
For perspective, ask yourself, what is eighty feet tall in Green River? A rough guess is that the very tallest building is forty feet high; OK fifty, but where is that? Most structures near King Kong’s spot are about twenty, but rarely over thirty feet high.
My personal concern stems from owning a nearby apartment building, and I am therefore concerned about property values. It’s unclear if spending a lot of time near a 5G tower is detrimental to health, but many people all over the world believe that it causes major health problems, like neurological disorders or even things like Covid. 5G towers are sometimes vandalized or even felled over. Some or all of this is just the result of crazy conspiracy theorizing, which is, in fact, not unusual in Wyomign (who’s the legitimate president for example), but the reality or perceived reality could certainly affect property values.
I am neither a scientist nor a health expert, but perhaps no one at the meeting was, either. So here we have a bunch of people discussing something that we have no qualifications to discuss, which we couldn’t discuss anyway, because, according to Planning and Zoning Administrator Amy Cox, city government is not allowed to discuss things like possible health effects on the community, only the “aesthetics” of the project. Whereas we were not allowed to saying anything, and because no one would see King Kong, there couldn’t possibly be anything to talk about; but talk we did.
In late May the city sent me a vague notification about the proposal, addressed to “Adjacent Property Owner/Interested Party”, and the time and place of the meeting.
I shared this information with my tenants, because I thought it was the decent thing, the democratic thing, to do.
In that area there are many working people at the Post Office, and several businesses, and there are many apartment tenants, and houses, very nearby.
Really, not too many “Property Owners” live or even work there, but there are a lot of “Interested Parties”, such as people who live or work there. My silly democratic beliefs make me think that all these people have a right, and a need, to know about this proposal.
I said so and got chewed out.
City Council member Gary Killpack vigorously insisted that city guidelines only require that property and business owners within one-hundred feet had to be informed, per city guidelines, and so the city was not negligent in informing people, and was in fact generous in informing me because my property is about two-hundred feet away. I eventually wondered if Gary’s next move was to take worker and tenant voting rights away.
City employees should be applauded for following guidelines, but too often these miss the mark completely, because guidelines are based on what has happened in the past, and never on the developing future. Sometimes a little initiative and consideration are helpful and appropriate, and shouldn’t really be that big of a deal.
Though things may be boring in Green River now, just wait till King Kong gets there and everyone starts twitching and wheezing and Trump is reinstated as president, “sooner than you think.”
Although few will be able to vote, and property values will be down, we’ll at least have better phones to play games on, and all the AI advantages of 5G, like 100% unemployment, and robots to bully us around.
Tom Gagnon
Rock Springs
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