Couple say satellite dishes near home spoiling the view

Jeffrey Libby

Tuesday, May 21, 2002 | 11:12 a.m.

Linda and Marv Schrick keep a spotless kitchen in a trophy house, but out the window over the kitchen sink are five archaic satellite dishes that spoil the view.

"They're illegal. I want them out of here," Linda Schrick said recently, the antique dining room table of her downtown home covered with city documents and news clippings. They date back to 1987, when the first three dishes appeared, five years before the Schricks bought their home.

Since 1987 a succession of four cable companies using the same gargantuan dishes have managed to keep a lock on business in the nearby Hemenway Valley -- even though the service is "spotty," "fuzzy" and regularly fails for hours, sometimes days, according to customers.

"When elected officials campaign on beautifying the town and then turn around and do spot zoning, it's extremely frustrating," Schrick said. "I've been promised and jerked around for the last four years."

In Schrick's quiet, leafy neighborhood just up the road from the Coffee Cup Cafe and City Hall, neighbors in recent years have built a community garden and a private park. Many, like the Schricks, have spent money improving their homes. It's time for the city to support private investment here, as it has in other parts of town, Schrick said.

"I know it (the cable office) is unsightly and doesn't create a good image," Mayor Bob Ferraro said, "But if we forced them out, the Hemenway Valley wouldn't have any TV." Eagle West Cable is the fourth cable business to occupy 1400 Colorado St., but it still operates with the original satellite dishes, even though city contracts going back to the first buyout -- of Frontier Cable by Empire Cable -- required that the dishes be removed if the business was sold.

Among other violations of city codes at the building: No block wall has been built, no parking is provided, and spare antenna towers and spools of cable are piled haphazardly on the roof and against the side of the building.

It's not that the city hasn't tried to accommodate the Schricks and their neighbors.

The city located a vacant federal parcel in the Hemenway Valley and offered to bring utilities to the site if Eagle West would move. But Eagle West declined after mulling for six months.

In November 2001 Boulder City Attorney Dave Olson wrote to Jim Collins, president of Eagle West Cable, based in Mesa, Ariz., and asked him to remove the dishes by December.

"The satellite dishes continue to detract from the residential character of the neighborhood," Olson wrote.

Collins said Monday that he sent the city a letter two weeks ago offering to remove the five dishes and build two smaller dishes on another part of the property.

But neither Olson nor the city manager had seen it.

"Words are easy," Olson said. "But if he sent the letter, I'm of the opinion that it's more of a delay tactic than a sincere intention."

City Councilwoman Andrea Anderson, like other city officials, said she hoped Cox Cable would buy out Eagle West, bring in new technology and retire the old dishes.

But Steve Schorr, a Cox Cable spokesman, said Monday there are no negotiations.

That isn't good news for anyone.

Carol Dunkeson, a cable TV customer who lives at the Bay View condominiums in the Hemenway Valley, said she's seen the "unsightly" satellites and sympathizes with that neighborhood. But the dishes often create a nuisance for her, too, interrupting her TV service.

"It goes out all the time. It might be 30 minutes, it might be an hour or it might be a day," she said. "But when it's the only service around, what can you do?"