Opinion

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A motion from Worcester County Commissioner Bud Church for a Verizon tower ... at the Ocean Pines Wastewater Treatment Plant failed to receive a second from the other county commissioners during their meeting last Tuesday.

The area has been known for dropped calls and generally poor service for years. Church said he brought the issue forward after Verizon Wireless approached him about it.

“It’ll be brought up again as an issue because the service is so poor,” Church said.

The above is from a news story that appeared in the Bayside Gazette in February 2020, after Church tried to get the county commissioners to reconsider their December 2019 rejection of a five-year lease agreement for a cell tower site at the county’s wastewater facility in Ocean Pines.

That project died because Ocean Pines’ commissioner representatives, Chip Bertino and Jim Bunting, opposed it, and the other commissioners deferred to them.

Bunting and Bertino argued that the tower company was not giving the county adequate antenna space and that nearby property owners did not want the structure within their line of sight.

“I don’t think it [the tower] has a place in our community,” Bertino said at the time.