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.

As Church predicted, that issue is an issue again, and it likely will continue to be one for several more years. Mostly that’s because the argument made in 2019 will be made again: Ocean Pines would be better served by a tower site outside the community. Finding it, though, is the problem.

As the commissioners were told three years ago, site location is not a simple process. It entails evaluating radio frequency ranges and reliability, environmental concerns and surviving a rigorous state and federal permit process.

The irony is that Ocean Pines has had a qualifying site since 2008. But unless some minds are changed, the dropped calls and lost signals will continue,  even as the public these days relies almost exclusively on cell service to communicate.