Opponents of a proposed cell tower in Wapiti have been blocked from joining a pending legal battle over the project.

Horizon Tower wants to build a 195-foot tower to boost cell service in the Wapiti Valley, but the plans were fiercely opposed by area residents and ultimately rejected by Park County Commissioners in February. Horizon then turned to Wyoming’s U.S. District Court, asking a judge to overturn the commissioners’ decision and greenlight the project.

The Wapiti Valley Preservation Group — a group of nine nearby residents and landowners who oppose the “monstrous structure” — asked to join the lawsuit in late June. The group has framed the dispute in stark terms. In a filing last month, the Wapiti residents said “their magical valley and, indeed, the sanctity they have sought” is being threatened by “a rapacious out-of-state speculative cell tower developer” seeking to “construct and operate a grotesque industrial monstrosity.”

On Thursday, however, U.S. Magistrate Judge Kelly Rankin rejected their request to intervene, saying the suit was not the place for residents “to re-voice and re-hash their concerns of erecting a cell tower.”

“The time for that was at the public hearings …,” Rankin wrote in his nine-page decision.

The only questions on the table, he said, are whether the federal Telecommunications Act required commissioners to approve the tower and whether their decision to reject it was supported by substantial evidence. The landowners don’t have a true legal interest in either of those issues, Rankin concluded.

“If the Court were to allow intervention by any neighbor or member of the community whenever a zoning decision was in dispute, it would open the floodgates for unneeded secondary argument,” he wrote at another point.

Unlike the multiple public hearings that the commissioners held on the tower, “a federal courthouse is not a public forum for anyone to come and have their say,” Rankin wrote.

The judge also ruled that, by waiting until June to seek to join a case that began in March, the Wapiti Valley Preservation Group took too long; he noted that the Telecommunications Act requires the case to be heard on an expedited basis.

The group is represented by a New York attorney, Robert J. Berg, who specializes in cell tower litigation. Berg had explained that it took time for the Wapiti residents, who are “of modest means,” to raise the funds needed to hire “a skilled telecommunications attorney with the experience needed to effectively represent and protect their unique interests.”

He also argued that, without the group’s intervention, the Park County Attorney’s Office might be outgunned by the lawyers retained by Horizon.

“... the sorry history of cell tower litigation shows that without the participation of intervenors, federal courts all too frequently order cell tower permits,” Berg and fellow New York attorney Patrick Slyne wrote.

However, Rankin ruled that the Wapiti residents’ interests “if any, are adequately represented” by the county.

The judge — who served as the Park County Attorney more than a decade ago — noted that the commissioners’ decision to block the tower was in-line with the neighbors’ wishes. Had the commission approved the project, Rankin indicated he might have reached a different decision.

In a Monday interview, Berg said the Wapiti Valley Preservation Group will likely file an objection to Rankin’s ruling and ask presiding U.S. District Judge Alan Johnson to overturn it. Berg contends that adding the group to the case would not delay the proceedings — currently set for an April 2024 trial — and that the neighbors do have a substantial legal interest.

“There’s no one who has a greater interest in having their rights protected than the intervenors here,” Berg said. He has two weeks to file an objection.

Meanwhile, in Park County’s District Court, retired Judge John Perry is considering a similar situation: A group of Cody residents who live near the site of a proposed temple for The Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints is seeking to intervene in a suit the church has filed against the City of Cody’s Planning, Zoning and Adjustment Board. The board is set to consider the temple’s plans at noon Tuesday at the Cody Auditorium.