Story and photos by Carla Occaso

MONTPELIER — Never mind rummage sales and chicken pie suppers, churches today have a whole new way to bring in extra money — thanks to modern technology.

VTel Wireless, a cellular service company based in Springfield, Vermont, contacted the Bethany Church on Main Street back in 2012 about hosting a wireless antenna system in its towering spire, according to church building team chairman Gary Rogers. This past February, many permits and planning meetings later, the project began to come to fruition.

“They are putting antennas in our steeple and it will be for wireless communication. This has been going on for a number of years, and they are just getting around to installing them,” Rogers said on March 24, when The Bridge first inquired about what the men on a crane were doing to the spire.

In fact, the state-of-the-art wireless technology will be sharing space with a rare historic bell forged by Paul Revere and Sons in 1825 and purchased by the Bethany Church in 1826, according to Anita Rogers, Gary’s wife, reading from a history of the Bethany Church covering the years 1808 to 2008. The bell was made by Paul Revere’s grandson and is one of only eight bells in Vermont known to have been made by that company.

Mixing advanced technology with historic landmarks is part of the overall challenge of connecting Vermonters to high-speed Internet service, according to Michel Guite, president of VTel, in a recent telephone interview with The Bridge. For example, the historic glass windows and wooden frames on the Bethany Church spire do not allow higher frequency radio waves to go through them, Guite said. Therefore, as with many projects like this one, replicas of the windows made of a plexiglas-type material that allows higher frequencies through must be installed. Then, the antique windows must be carefully stored. Getting permits for all this accounted for some of the project’s slow pace. “They had to get permits to take out the windows and the louvres. They need to replace them with something that would look the same,” Guite said. He also said part of the deal is that VTel will take responsibility for housing the antique windows safely on site, just in case — some time in the future — church parishioners have reason to reinstall the original windows.

In addition to solving the window problem, other preparatory work has to be done, Gary Rogers said. For example, the Vermont Public Service Board required a platform be installed behind the church so a utility rack to house the controls for the antennas can be  installed above the flood line. Rogers said that the big flood in 1992 destroyed the lower level of the church, requiring a complete renovation.

Once the correct supporting structures — such as the outdoor platform and the high-frequency friendly windows — are installed, the antennas can go in. The spire has multiple levels inside, including one 62 feet up that is home to the giant Revere bell. The antennas will be 80 feet up in the air in the next level of the steeple.

As for health concerns about human beings coming in close contact with the radio waves in order to ring the bell, Rogers said he was assured they were safe. “I specifically asked if there was any danger in going up there and he (the VTel representative) said, ‘absolutely not,’” Rogers said.

Neither Rogers nor Guite would divulge exactly how much money the lease is paying the church per month, but according to a 2010 article written by John W. Pestle titled “Cell Tower Leases: Dos and Don’ts for Churches” published on www.varnumlaw.com, a typical lease in such a situation would be for no less than $1,000 per month.

“Churches are frequently approached to lease land for a cell tower or to lease space on the church building for a cellular antenna. This will continue for the foreseeable future, because the expanded capabilities of new cell phones and wireless devices like the iPhone and iPad strain existing wireless networks. So thousands of new towers will be added each year,” Pestle writes.

Guite confirmed Pestle’s prediction, saying that VTel is currently in the process of installing 155 antenna systems in Vermont. “All these things take a long time. Everyone is trying to move them ahead. You might sometimes get a site built in eight months; other times it takes years,” Guite said.