{"id":3740,"date":"2013-09-04T16:23:17","date_gmt":"2013-09-04T20:23:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=3740"},"modified":"2013-09-11T18:19:14","modified_gmt":"2013-09-11T22:19:14","slug":"second-meeting-to-be-set-over-longos-cell-tower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/second-meeting-to-be-set-over-longos-cell-tower\/","title":{"rendered":"Second meeting to be set over Longo\u2019s cell tower"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/p>\n

Aurora residents will soon have a second chance to sound off on a proposed new cell phone tower slated for the northwest corner of the Longo\u2019s plaza at Bayview and Wellington.<\/p>\n

As The Auroran went to press on Tuesday, Altus Group, consultants retained by Bell Canada over the tower, were due to meet with area residents at the Aurora Pubic Library to hear their thoughts. What\u2019s at stake is a 29.9 metre flagpole style telecommunications tower, complete with an equipment shelter and perimeter fencing just metres between the grocery store and the residential development branching out from John West Way.<\/p>\n

While the consultants were required to send notices of the public meeting to everyone within a certain degree of the area in question, some neighbours were missed in the process, according to Alexandra Schaffhauser of Altus. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe had missed a few residents on the notification document that went out, and so we\u2019re going to be sending out another notice to those residents who were missed in the initial mail-out noting a second meeting will be set up for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

A date for a second meeting has not yet been pinned down. <\/p>\n

According to Marco Ramunno, Director of Planning for the Town of Aurora, the company was required to notify residents within a 120 metre radius of the proposed site, but some of the condominium town homes nearby received notification from their own condo corporation rather than Bell\u2019s consultants themselves. He advised the consultants they needed to provide residents directly with 30 days\u2019 notice of a public meeting.<\/p>\n

For some Councillors, a second meeting was welcome news.<\/p>\n

\u201cI am glad that if they have missed some people, or some people feel they have been missed that they\u2019re responsible enough to hold a second meeting to make sure that everybody is included,\u201d said Councillor Chris Ballard.<\/p>\n

The issue hits close to home for Councillor John Gallo. Councillor Gallo said when considering this cell tower proposal, he is \u201cstruggling\u201d to reconcile the fact Health Canada says there is no significant health issue with these towers, contrary to other studies in the public domain. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to do our due diligence. I am not in favour of just saying, \u2018No, get rid of it. Don\u2019t put it there.\u2019 If the opinion is we need to put it somewhere else, then where and how? Would we be moving the problem somewhere else and having the other residents deal with it? That is not fair either. It shouldn\u2019t be a NIMBY-ism kind of thing. We need to figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

A cell tower just behind the plaza might be the best place for it and, in that event, there is no use fighting it, he added, noting he would wait to see how the studies and consultation shook down. This time around, however, looking back to the Town of Aurora\u2019s recent battle with Bell Canada over the cell phone tower on the King side of Bathurst Street, he says he\u2019s hopeful Aurora will have more of an impact, but he was \u201csomewhat skeptical\u201d as to how much.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo matter what we say, they may be willing to do a little bit but the issues are higher up in the upper level government than what we can do on this level,\u201d he said. \u201cI am not sure how much they will listen to us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once both public meetings are concluded, the next step is for the information and feedback to be compiled and sent to the Town for Mr. Ramunno\u2019s review. Once that is done, a report will be sent to Council for the tower\u2019s approval. <\/p>\n

\u201cI want to be able to identify to Council whether they have, obviously, fulfilled the public consultation requirements to Industry Canada\u2019s protocol and our protocol as well.\u201d <\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aurora residents will soon have a second chance to sound off on a proposed new cell phone tower slated for the northwest corner of the Longo\u2019s plaza at Bayview and Wellington.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-Yk","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-04 08:29:38","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3740\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}