Town seeks consolidation of various utility lines

The town will ask Frontier Communications to consolidate its telephone and cable lines on Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. poles.

The Town Board at a meeting this week discussed the issue of having a large number of poles in Rhinebeck. Councilman Joseph Gelb said the concerns were raised by Slate Quarry Road residents.

“Central Hudson moves power lines ... which formerly had Central Hudson lines and Frontier lines,” Gelb said. “Frontier has not moved the telephone lines to loopholes installed by Central Hudson.”

Gelb said the situation for property owners is “particularly egregious in that they have telephone lines in their backyard within 20 feet of their house and Central Hudson no longer uses those poles but installed new poles across the front of their yards. So they are surrounded by telephone wires and electrical wires.”

Property owners have been unsuccessful in ef- forts to convince Frontier to consolidate lines.

“My own experience is sometimes you get action if something goes through the president of the company,” Gelb said. “They usually have a special person who takes care of complaints to the president.”

Town Supervisor Elizabeth Spinzia said the problem with Frontier lines has received a lot of unwanted attention.

“Over the past four years, they stopped co-locating, and I’ve been told by people at Central Hudson that it used to be par for the course that they’d co-locate on Central Hudson poles, which are higher than the telephone poles,” she said.

“We went through this in our neighborhood this summer and fall,” Spinzia said. “When several dozen poles were relocated, Frontier would not co-locate. I have a pole on my front yard and tried to get them to co-locate, with no success, as did several friends and neighbors.”

A Frontier representative on Wednesday said the company would review the concerns.