Southold Town’s years-long effort to improve spotty cell service across the North Fork is beginning to move from planning to implementation, with several new cell towers in the works and Verizon proposing the town’s first network of small-cell antennas.

Planning Director Heather Lanza told the Town Board Tuesday morning that most areas of Southold are in line for upgrades, although she said that there are not yet firm timelines for the projects.

“Pretty exciting actually, because every part of town is going to get some kind of upgrade in the near future,” Lanza said. “Not sure how long it’ll take, but we have them in the works.”

The proposals include new towers in northern Mattituck, the Cutchogue Fire District and Southold Fire District, as well as a new tower at a Lutheran church near Greenport.

Verizon, meanwhile, is proposing smaller antennas mounted primarily on utility poles in several areas where cell service has long been problematic, including Hogs Neck/Bayview, Kenney’s Beach, McCabe’s Beach, Hortons Point Lighthouse and Mount Beulah, as well as parts of Peconic around Goldsmith Inlet.

The installations would mark Southold’s first use of so-called “small cells,” which can fill gaps in coverage without requiring a conventional cell tower.

The Town Attorney’s office is now working with Verizon on a license agreement allowing the company to place the equipment in town rights-of-way, Lanza said. Most would be installed on existing or replacement utility poles, although the proposal also calls for several new poles.

‘Implementation phase’

The flurry of activity follows Southold’s adoption of a new wireless code after an extensive effort to map gaps in service and identify locations where additional infrastructure could improve coverage.

Lanza said the town has since created new application forms and guidelines, established new fees and revised its billing and review procedures to implement the code.

The town has already held a pre-submission meeting on a proposed tower in northern Mattituck. Another proposed tower in the Cutchogue Fire District could be the largest in Southold. The town has held a pre-submission meeting on that proposal as well.

A third tower is being pursued by the Southold Fire District at one of its auxiliary properties. Lanza said she has been working with a representative of Elite Towers on moving that proposal forward.

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Near Greenport, a tower is proposed at a Lutheran church that could replace or supplement a much smaller T-Mobile installation on a wooden utility pole nearby.

The town’s wireless master plan had contemplated extending that pole, Lanza said, but the church proposal could provide a substantially taller conventional tower instead. If T-Mobile needs greater coverage in the area, she said, the carrier could potentially move its equipment to the new tower.

Southold is also looking at ways to get more coverage out of towers that already exist. Lanza said the town’s wireless plan calls for increasing the height of the tower at the Southold Animal Shelter. She is arranging a meeting with the tower company to determine how that could be accomplished and said she has already learned that raising it would not cost the town anything.

The remaining question is whether Southold would have to issue a request for proposals or could work directly with a tower company already operating in town. The town also hopes to begin discussions about raising an existing tower on Hortons Lane and getting additional carriers onto it.

Supervisor Al Krupski praised the progress Tuesday, noting how much work had gone into preparing the town for the current wave of proposals.

“That is a lot of good work in two years,” Krupski said.

Lanza said some of the projects will require public hearings while others could move through administrative review if they comply with the town’s new code and wireless plan.

For now, she said, the important change is that Southold has moved beyond identifying its coverage problems and writing regulations governing new wireless infrastructure.

“Exciting to be in the implementation phase of this after all that planning,” Lanza said.