Editorial Editorial (February 13, 2004)

A lesson for city in antenna tiff

As residents know and as visitors observe, the lines of demarcation between cities in Silicon Valley are not obvious. They are not divided by major streets or waterways or walls.

But a city border is what's partially responsible for the uproar over a cellular antenna located in a church spire on Springer Road, one of the many streets separating the cities of Mountain View and Los Altos.

When Mountain View prepared to approve the installation of the antenna, only those living in Mountain View were notified. Los Altos residents, who were not required by law to be notified, were left in the dark and are consequently upset now.

But regardless of how the residents feel about the safety of living near a cellular tower, it is the federal government, not Mountain View, that should be the focus of their protest. Mountain View officials are quick to note that even if the residents had contacted the city before the tower installation was approved, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 stops local governments from blocking such projects.

After the antenna was installed, an engineer hired by Cingular measured radiation around the church property's boundaries and found the highest reading was 1 percent of the FCC's acceptable limit for humans to incur, according to Seventh-Day Adventist Church Pastor Curtis Church.

Given such measurements, the Los Altos residents' claim that their property values will decrease as a result of the antenna appear to be unfounded. Over the years, repeated attempts to prove that cell phone towers are health hazards have failed to take root, as have claims that cell phones themselves emit dangerous radiation directly to the head of the user.

What these residents might genuinely be upset about is what they perceive to be unneighborly behavior from Mountain View.

Prior to the arguments over the antenna, several Los Altos residents raised concerns over the construction of a new Mountain View reservoir, located entirely within Los Altos on Miramonte Road. Whether it was justified, they felt put at risk and taken advantage of by their neighboring city.

And while the two cities continue to communicate about the reservoir, the outrage over the antenna tower could have been avoided by one simple step -- adding nearby Los Altos homeowners to the original notification list, or simply sending the details to Los Altos City Hall, which would have then been responsible for notifying its own residents.

For although Mountain View may have no legal obligation to notify Los Altos residents about the impact of a potential project, it would certainly go a long way toward defusing confrontations over antennae and other projects that some residents may perceive as dangerous to their health or well-being, even if the evidence indicates otherwise.

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