Eyes of the Beholder

Westwood residents near Temple Beth David won.

Members of the Westwood Planning Board recently a cell tower in the neighborhood.

Then again, maybe they didn’t really win; the petitioners might take the Planning Board to court and end up victorious.

These applicants included SBA Towers II, LLC; T-Mobile Northeast, LLC; and MetroPCS Massachusetts LLC. Collaterally they wanted to build a 99-foot flagpole-style with three T-Mobile panels.

Ugly: that was the objection.

Now any fact that depends on people’s collective judgment can be legally slippery. But all the immediate neighbors and all the Planning Board members agreed, it offended, so the town’s tastes prevailed. Anyway, the petitioners never did bring along sample material to show the Planning Board. So maybe they might have lost their bid in a courtroom instead of Westwood’s Planning Board. If there is any action from the court to correct the problem it might be to send it back to the Planning Board for a new hearing.

More time will pass with neither side getting a final adjudication.

But there remains a problem.

There are 2,200 Westwood cell phones that had bad service. Still do.

They are the people the telephone companies are trying to help here. Those people are the crux of the matter. For them, every day is a frustration.

Calls arrive, but they are unintelligible. Calls go out, but they are only gibberish. Anybody wanting to be certain their message arrives at the other end must go and make the call from outside the house. In desperate situations, the caller needs to get in the car, drives to a more acceptable location and makes the call. Often, the caller must turn right; then left to maintain the call strength even during these special calls.

Any family that tries to keep tabs on teenagers knows that the cell phone is indispensable. If it fails to keeps family members in touch, the cell phone is useless.

Any business person knows how important a buyer or seller message can be. In the case of anybody who lives in a bad signal area, business calls cannot be trusted to the cell phone. Cell phones are, therefore, useless to those customers.

Those customers, those 2,200 victims, deserve the same service all the rest of Westwood gets.

Some neighbors might say it's those people’s bad luck. The 99-foot-tall cell tower is simply too ugly to be erected near Temple Beth David: period.

Maybe this is so to those who hold Westwood to a more stringent place in which to reside.

The center of town along Route 109 has been stripped of unsightly utility poles and overhead wires to afford a lovely visual area, and Islington on Route 1A is similarly without wires.

These spots demonstrate how sincere Westwood really is about keeping the town pristine.

Laudable, these areas are, truly well done.

However, most streets in Westwood, indeed most towns and cities in America, are festooned with tons of chemically-treated wood and thousands of miles of wires that link every home in the civilized world. The wires carry all sorts of services, telephones being one.

It would be madness to propose that all these absolutely necessary facilities be ripped down because they are ugly. This would cause an absolute uproar.

Understandable; yet a single pole that would service 2,200 homes is deemed unacceptable because it is unsightly: sole reason.

When all the poles and wires are taken down and all the public has to depend on is an occasional 100-foot-tall pole to carry signals, will that tall pole suddenly be tolerable?

Ugly is – it would seem -- in the pocket of the beholder.