Photo of Centreville Town Hall Building taken in March 2022
Photo of Centreville Town Hall Building taken in March 2022
CENTREVILLE — Centerville Public Works’ attempt to install a water meter tower in Symphony Village has been met with public outcry from residents within the community. During the Aug. 18 meeting of the Centreville Town Council many residents from the retirement community gathered to speak out against the decision to install a radio water meter tower at the center of the community.
Back in 2015, the Town began to shift from water meters that required manual drive-by scanning rituals by employees to a more computerized system that utilizes radio frequency.
According to Centreville’s Director of Public Works Clifford Matthews, the new water meter towers that are supplied by Neptune Technology Group allow customers to view their water usage in “real time” through a sign in portal that graphs out usage over extended periods of time—completely eradicating the manual scanning and input system that takes four weeks to to complete.
As of right now, there are three existing antennas — on top of water towers at the North Brook Water Treatment Plant, behind the Centreville Firehouse, and the Water Treatment Plant on Comet Drive.
Discussions of adding the antenna to Symphony Village started back in February, said Town Manager Chip Koogle. They started outreach to the community about the project in April, which according to Koogle was unique to Symphony Village to establish transparency between the town and the community.
“We knew coming in [to the project] that [the existing antennas] were not going to collect all of Symphony Village,” Matthews said.
Matthews told the council that the project is an ongoing upgrade and that the previous town council was responsible for putting in the 2022 fiscal year budget.
Many residents that spoke at the public comment portion of the meeting stressed that they support the installation of the project, but are not in favor of the Symphony Way traffic circle location.
Steve Quiggley, one of many residents to speak during the public comment portion of the Town Council meeting, summarized concerns of the community to the health effects of RadioFrequency (RF) radiation, the attractiveness of the tower, and the potentiality of the tower devaluing the surrounding property in the neighborhood.
To combat the concerns that the tower would hinder the aesthetics of the community, Matthews said that they agreed to possibly ordering an antenna pole that resembles a flag pole with the option of adding a flag lanyard, instead of installing a three-legged tower that was agreed to be intrusive and aesthetically disruptive—preceding additional landscaping that will cover the cellular box that transfers the data to the financial department of Water & Water Waste Management.
Many of the residents also expressed concerns that their questions had not been answered when Public Works met with the community on June 28 for a private Q&A about the project; however, they mainly wanted to address their disapproval of the location of the 75 foot antenna.
According to Matthews, there were two locations being considered for the project, the traffic circle — this of which Matthews has identified to be optimal citing the Neptune propagation study — and the pump station located at the far end of Symphony Way, off the walking trail.
Both properties are owned by the Town of Centreville.
The official Q&A sheet that was made available on the town’s website after Symphony Village’s June meeting states the pump station location is not ideal for this project because “it will not pick up all Symphony Village resident meters and is only considered as a secondary location because of the possibility to add additional subscribers to the tower.”
Matthews and Koogle also said that Neptune’s propagation study and site evaluation of this secondary location would require the installation of a second 75 foot tower to compensate because the signal cannot reach all of the meters in the neighborhood as well as potential radio interference due the towers’ close proximity to one another.
This antenna will be solely utilized to keep track of the preexisting radio water meters in Symphony Village, Matthews said, but it is a part of a larger project to complete what he called the ‘gateway’ in Centreville. The term is used to describe the entire system of which Public Works of Centreville is using.
Still, residents of the community are asking the council and public works to compromise and “find another solution.”
“Just because that piece of property is owned [by the town], [that] should not make it the final answer, there’s got to be another way, there’s got to be another solution,” one resident said.
The public comment portion of the meeting ended with Council President Steve Kline agreeing to set up a meeting with the Symphony Village HOA Board of Directors to discuss turning the antenna into a flagpole and deciding who will be responsible for landscaping upkeep at the next closed session meeting.
“If there was another way we’d do it,” Koogle said. “We have to do what is in the best interest of the town and that is moving towards a more ‘state-of-the-art’ model and away from the antiquated current system.”
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