Save Dewey Beach sends a letter to AT & T Executives calling them out for now proposing to put 5G cell towers in locations very close to the locations they are being removed from. The group has videos and a large scale public campaign calling out the numerous reasons to halt 5G on beaches.
Dear Mr John Stanky, AT&T Executives and AT&T Board Members,
I wanted to introduce myself as Dan Dionisio, Chairperson of the Save Dewey Beach organization – SaveDeweyBeach.org . I have been involved in managing large nonprofits through my work as a volunteer for over 20 years and have received 16 accolades from Federal, State and local political representatives for my work and resulting accomplishments.
I am attaching a newspaper article that sums up well the current controversy in Dewey Beach and our perspective on it. I am also bcc’ing in159 email addresses including our Federal and State representatives, coastal state Governors and numerous towns and media from around the country that have expressed interest in this topic.
Our town and political representatives have recently come to an understanding with Verizon that they will remove 3 poles they have already placed near our beaches. Their decision was based on several factors including a massive digital ad campaign, a raising awareness campaign and a class action lawsuit that was brought against Verizon by Alex Pires. Our campaigns generated more than 600 individually
I am writing this email because the citizens of our town were surprised to hear that AT&T is proposing to place three 5G telephone poles on Dewey‘s beaches in the near exact same locations as the Verizon poles were in that they just agreed to move – Collins Ave and Clayton Ave and now a new location on McKinley. The research and amount of thought that went into such a design decision escapes us.
As you may know, six weeks ago we started a movement to raise awareness about what happened to the community of Dewey Beach with the placement of telephone poles near our beaches. As part of our campaigns, we did the following:
1. Launched the SaveDeweyBeach.org website and are averaging 2,477 users per day since inception.
2. Launched a Facebook page that has reached over 700,000 interested parties and generated more than 200,000 post engagements in less than 4 weeks and thousands of likes.
3. Generated over 600 individually signed petitions objecting to what Verizon has done with the telephone pole placement and what Tilson and now AT&T and the other wireless carriers are attempting to do. Each originally signed petition is sent to 159 email addresses across the country – State Governors’, media, board members and executives, environmental activists etc.
4. We were contacted by 6 Governor’s offices and 16 coastal towns wanting more information about what is going on in Dewey Beach with regard to the telephone pole placement.
5. Mailed our “Red Protest Card” to 912 Dewey Beach property owners explaining what has happened in DeweyBeach regarding the telephone poles and we will be doing the same for ATT now.
6. Developed a data base of over 10,200 interested parties as they interacted with our website, event and Facebook pages and who sent us emails.
7. We held a very successful protest on July 5th on Rodney Avenue in Dewey. We were asked to cancel the protest due to Senator Ernie B Lopez (R) – Delaware General Assembly’s Instagram post announcing Verizon had verbally agreed to move the poles, but we were not willing to do that.
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Although AT&T may have the legal right to do something, it doesn’t mean you should do it. “ ESG” are not just initials to our generation. Governing with integrity and with a true sense of social concern and community matters. Investors are pulling money away from non-conforming ESG companies and are looking for those that are compliant.
The placement of the Verizon telephone poles lacked the thoughtfulness that should have been exhibited for a small coastal beach town. To know that there are other engineering solutions and that they still placed them near the beach is hard to reconcile. An organization doing what they could get away with is what makes all of this look so bad.
The ESG and environmental standards that corporations need to meet today are being driven by the younger generation of employees that demand their companies are better global and environmental citizens. The issue we are all dealing with now in Dewey Beach has involved a huge response from younger people and is heading to Tik Tok and Instagram through organized campaigns in the coming weeks.
I wanted to briefly outline our movement’s next steps in raising awareness about what has happened in DeweyBeach and now what we are going to do in order to stop AT&T from placing poles on our beaches:
1. Monday, AT&T and the map you sent Dewey Beach with your proposed poles to be located on our beaches will mentioned in a Washington Post article. I will be quoted giving you the benefit of the doubt that you will work with the town and not pursue such an aggressive pole placement plan. Future articles by the Post and the Times will better reflect your willingness to work with Dewey and other small towns or not. This article is part of our ongoing campaign to raise awareness about the national phenomena that is occurring where wireless carriers are not putting much thought into the placement of these poles in small beach towns like ours.
2. Monday and Tuesday, 912 Dewey Beach property owners will be made aware in detail as to what is going on regarding AT&T’s interest in placing telephone poles on Dewey’s Beach and will be called to action.
3. Tuesday, a social media campaign will begin to engage our younger Dewey Beach audience with the new news about AT&T.
4.Tuesday, I will personally email over 200 Town Managers and Mayors of coastal towns across the country to inform them as to what has happened in Dewey and that AT&T is now going to attempt to do the same thing. I will solicit their help in raising a greater sense of awareness about the issue. I will be sharing the pics, videos, articles and contact information of those we think they should be in touch with to start making sure their voices and their community voices are heard much like ours are in Dewey are.
5.Tuesday, our PR firm will purse promotion opportunities and articles about what AT&T is now doing and what we are doing about it in several national papers and TV shows.
6.Tuesday, we will begin the distribution of our red card yard signs and fliers to the many local Deweyproperty owners.
7.During the week, our documentary team will continue filming and developing the story of these 5G carriers and our efforts to push back on them. We plan to submit our documentary to the many film festivals around the world.
8. We will continue to develop our national video about what has happened and will distribute it nationally across numerous venues and social media outlets.
9.We will be launching a major Tik Tok and Instagram campaign targeting the younger generations.
10.We will begin our board meeting advocacy efforts during the third quarter of 2021.
As mentioned above, our town has worked very hard to reverse a mistake that all agree now could have been handled better. To hear that ATT is tone deaf to the issues and recent history around Dewey Beach is surprising.
Many of the initiatives I outlined above will begin Tuesday or later in the week. I hope your staff takes some additional time to look into what you are about to do here and reaches out to our Town Manager Bill Zolper to clarify your intentions. I will speak with Bill late Monday to see if he has heard anything more from you on the matter. TownManager@
We will be following up this email with a few hundred of the over 600 individually signed petitions we collected when our focus was on Verizon. These petitions will be sent to you plus the 159 email addresses I referred to earlier as we continue to raise awareness about the topic and what AT&T’s attempting to do along Dewey‘s beaches.
Please see the pole pics and videos in the drop box attached.
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/
Best regards
