Anti-tower Postcards Baffle Lake Como

Gretchen Schmidhausler doesn't know who sent her a glossy postcard urging Lake Como residents to “stop the tower.”

In fact, no one in Lake Como seems to know who sent out the colorful 5-by-8-inch mailer to both elected officials and residents in this small town and three neighboring communities.

The postcard bears no return address or postmark. It does, however, sport first-class postage rather than the third-class postage usually reserved for mass mailings such as political campaign literature.

A member of the recently formed Concerned Citizens of Lake Como, Schmidhausler says the grassroots group did not send out the mailer. The group is composed mainly of residents living adjacent to the borough-owned Behrmann Park. It has led the charge in opposing construction of the proposed new WRAT-FM radio tower in the Green Acres-protected park as referenced on the postcard.

“We didn’t do it,” Schmidhausler said of the mailer addressed only to "Resident."

It’s anyone’s guess as to who sent out the postcards or where they originated. Even Mayor Michael Ryan and members of the borough council have no idea who sent the pieces to their home addresses.

Since receiving the postcard, Schmidhausler said she has learned that the mailers also went out to mailboxes in Spring Lake, Spring Lake Heights and the West Belmar section of Wall Township.

Officials and residents in those three municipalities have protested against the proposed tower during public meetings in Lake Como. If constructed, the 533-foot-high behemoth would tower over homes in those communities and dwarf Spring Lake's Marucci Park.

Portions of those communities physically border the park's southwest corner where Greater Media, Inc. owner of WRAT, wants to erect the tower and a two-story ancillary building on a 4,000-square-foot tract.

The postcard’s front shows a color photo of a non-descript radio transmission tower. Next to that, in a separate photo, an unidentified woman dressed in a suit jacket holds up her right hand. Over the woman’s head, the caption reads “What will a 533-ft. cell tower do to your property value?”

On the back of the postcard, the sender references a July 11 Asbury Park Press article about community opposition to cellular and radio transmission towers in residential areas. It then paraphrases statements from Greater Media’s real estate expert about the impact the tower would have on local property values.

“Greater Media’s real estate agent says ZERO. Sound true to you? This is what their claimed ‘tax break’ relies on,” the copy reads.

Next, the sender urges recipients to “Demand an independent property valuation study” and to “Demand an independent environmental impact study.”

Contact information for the Lake Como governing body is printed underneath an explanatory paragraph along with individual email addresses for Ryan and the council members.

Finally, the words “Demand the facts. Stop the tower” are printed above the address label.

Regardless of where the postcard came from, Ryan says Lake Como will not give in to demands for property value and environmental impact studies. Out-of-towners battlling the borough about the tower are the ones requesting those studies and the formation of a tower commission, he noted.

“We won’t be spending our taxpayers’ money to conduct studies or form commissions,” Ryan said after Monday night’s council meeting. “I’m not going to be told by another town what to do.”

The governing body is attempting to place a borough-wide referendum question relative to the tower issue on November's general election ballot.

Via the referendum, voters will be asked if they want the governing body to ask the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) to divert the proposed tower site in the park from Green Acres coverage.

If the state DEP were to grant the diversion, Greater Media would then be able to move forward in its plans to constructing the tower, pending other local approvals.

Upon completion of the tower, Lake Como would enter a 50-year-land lease with Greater Media that would generate $54,000 annually in revenue for the town, Ryan has said. That income would then be passed onto borough taxpayers as tax relief over the term of the 50-year lease, the mayor has said.