Cell-phone static

John McMahon was enjoying a quiet day off last November when he found his idyllic Glendale existence disrupted by a mysterious fleet of trucks that seemed to pull up out of nowhere. Seeing a crew immediately jump out and start spray-painting the street in front of his Cumberland Road home, McMahon went outside to ask them what was happening, and learned that the group was preparing to replace a sidewalk lamppost with a T-Mobile cell-phone tower designed to look like a palm tree. 

“I’d come out to ask the workers what was going on, and they had already explained they were working with ‘some phone equipment,’ but never actually said the words ‘cell phone,’” said McMahon. “I had barely received a notice warning me about the project, and people nationwide hate these things because they’re not sure if the radiation harms children and because the towers are ugly. But when I came back outside, all the trucks and men were gone.”

The men might have fled quickly, but McMahon was prepared to fight a long-term battle to keep the cell tower from being constructed next to his property. In the past three months, the grassroots movement he co-founded, called GOACT (Glendale Organized Against Cell Towers), has grown to encompass hundreds of area residents building on the groundwork of anti-tower activists in Pasadena and other cities. Despite going up against the goliath T-Mobile, they’ve scored an impressive victory already by convincing the Glendale City Council on Jan. 13 to impose a 45-day moratorium on all tower-related construction activity.

The purpose of the delay was to give city officials and attorneys the opportunity to assess their legal options, since most cell-tower issues are controlled by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the 1996 Federal Telecommunications Act, leaving local governments — agencies that must actually address citizens’ complaints — with their hands virtually tied.

GOACT made a particularly impressive show of force at the Jan. 7 Glendale council meeting, when more than 100 supporters arrived, causing a spillover that required numerous extra chairs to be set up for people forced to watch the proceedings on television in the downstairs lobby. Seven of the group’s leaders, including McMahon, were allowed to make a joint 35-minute PowerPoint presentation that strongly illuminated their arguments.

GOACT’s main hope is that their battle will follow the lead of a similar fight in San Diego, which resulted in a US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in September 2008 upholding the ability of San Diego County to regulate the placement of cell-phone towers in residential areas, a power challenged in court by telecom giants Pacific Bell (Cingular) and Sprint. But a protracted fight is likely to come first, if past experience in Pasadena is repeated.

Pasadena’s cell-tower controversy centered around the attempt to build a tower on a hill near Avenue 64. The application was denied by the city zoning hearing officer, then revised and presented to the Planning Commission, which approved it. The Planning Commission’s decision was called up for review by the City Council, but the property owner withdrew the application before it was ruled on. 

“In 2003, San Diego wrote a really restrictive ordinance that said everyone needs cell phones, but there have to be guidelines to how the towers are constructed,” said McMahon. “Like a 10-foot tower
10 feet from homes, 20 from 20, 30 from 30. It hasn’t been appealed yet, but the next level, if they do, is the Supreme Court.”
Meanwhile, in an emailed statement from its corporate public relations division, T-Mobile claimed that it is not just acting to improve its bottom line, but in the interest of improving Glendale residents’ ability to procure emergency services in a rapid fashion.

“T-Mobile is aware that the wireless coverage in homes and neighborhoods throughout the Glendale area isn’t the quality that it should be. Our customers have told us that they want to have the ability to stay in touch with their families in and around their neighborhood, receive a clear signal throughout their daily commute, and have the security that they can reach and stay connected with a 9-1-1 operator in an emergency,” the statement reads. “Over the past 18 months, T-Mobile has worked closely with the city of Glendale and the community as part of the site selection and permitting process.”

Yet McMahon contends that there has been no local outcry for more tower service, citing an informal study conducted by GOACT.

“We had 190 signatures and only eight were T-Mobile customers. So why the need to expand anyway?” asked McMahon. “We threatened to move their customers to I-Phones and take the list of zero T- Mobile members left down to the city. T-Mobile claims there are capacity issues, which means the number of people using a tower. But it’s a bogus issue if you have hardly any customers in an area.

“They’ve said they’re no longer married to this location, but they have applications out still with three different addresses,” McMahon continued. “I went to the city and pointed out errors in the application so they need to deny T-Mobile and they said that could hurt T-Mobile. I said if they’re not married to the spot, it shouldn’t present an undue burden on them.”

In fact, McMahon is so eager to find a solution that he’s even offered T-Mobile and the council a potential alternate tower site on vacant land in the hills above his neighborhood.  But to fellow GOACT member Elsie Kolfayan, the problem with the tower isn’t just the risk of radiation, or of its impeding the view with an eyesore, but also a matter of T-Mobile skirting city rules to gain its construction permit in the first place.

“The permit went through the Public Works Department and went through the encroachment process, which requires no public hearing or conditional use permit (CUP). A CUP in Glendale requires a hearing and Section 30.11.010 of the Glendale Code says that wireless communication facilities are permitted when no other feasible location exists or when denying it would prevent effective telecommunication,” explained Kolfayan. “They’re disfavored in residential zones. The permit application said the only solution they could find was one in the right of way. So the telecom company applied, not through the planning department, but through Public Works, eliminating the need for hearings. It was an internal process of the city, and the process seems to favor telecoms and not existing residents.”

Perhaps the biggest ace in the hole for GOACT is the guidance of Laura Friedman, a nine-year Glendale resident who happens to sit on the city’s Design Review Board. She provides a cool rationality to the debate, acknowledging that she is not opposed to “every single tower,” and is not even taking a stand on the highly debatable question of whether the towers emit dangerous levels of radiation.

“I believe the city has a right to regulate and the responsibility to regulate the towers. If these are part of the living environment, they should undergo the same process and review as all other built parts of our environment here,” said Friedman. “The real question is what the city eventually adopts as an ordinance, but I’m absolutely
glad they’re taking time with the moratorium. I was so proud of the community for coming out in such force and uniting the way they did.”

For his part, Glendale City Councilman Ara Najarian explained that the moratorium is the biggest step the city can take at this point.

“What we did was impose an outright comprehensive ban for 45 days, with instructions for our city attorney and planning staff, in light of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision in the San Diego County case, to give us a framework we can use,” said Najarian. “After we did that, broadcasters like CBS that are different from cell-phone companies said they have pre-existing transmission towers on hills not near homes, and asked us to lift the exemption for them to maintain their operations. [On Jan. 20] we introduced a very narrow set of exemptions for different types of broadcasts and we defined wireless more tightly, so that radio and TV would not be impacted by that. We started broad, perhaps excessively broad, so we’re [redefining things] so that uses not affecting neighborhoods are allowed to continue.”