AT&T Changes Plans for New Cell Tower

Can you hear them now?

The wireless cellphone provider AT&T had a community meeting Wednesday evening at the  to share with area residents their second proposed plan for a cell tower on top of the church at 342 Sierra Vista Ave.

The first plan for the tower was out in front of the church, but the city rejected it, in part because of residents’ complaints. This second design will also be presented to the city for approval, according to Charnel James, senior planner at NSA Wireless, the builder.

The community meeting, to which households within a 300-foot radius were invited, was a chance for residents to see the plans for the new tower and to get answers to any questions they might have had, according to AT&T spokeswoman Camille Anderson.

However, turnout for the meeting was low.

The new cell tower site is part of AT&T's plan to give local residents better cellphone coverage, because the nearest towers to the church are a mile and a half a mile away, explained Danilo Paloma, a radio frequency design engineer for AT&T. A 60-foot tower provides only a half mile of coverage, and the tower half a mile away is less than 60 feet tall.

“Mountain View is one area that has a problem with residents' use in-house,” he said, which is why AT&T has focused its attention on Mountain View, Los Altos and Palo Alto to expand their cell towers to meet the demands of the area.

According to Anderson, AT&T wireless traffic grew by 5,000 percent nationwide from 2007-09, which explains the need for an increase in infrastructure. The Bay Area also has the highest number of smartphone users in the country.

At the Seventh-day Adventist Church, the proposed height for the new tower is 38 feet and would cover a 0.3-mile radius. Originally, it was planned to be 60 feet, but AT&T tried hard to comply with city design standard, Paloma said, so they reduced the height.

He shared that because of the low coverage, the inability to make in-house calls “hinders emergency calls in houses with no landline."

When a cellphone can't get service, it can’t call 911, and then the caller has to go outside, which isn’t always possible, he added.

Another major problem for cellphone users out of range of a cell tower site is that their cellphone drains battery power faster trying to look for a nearby site. This leaves cellphone users with little to no battery when they need it, he explained.

James said she tried to make her design blend in with the design and construction of the rest of the building.

With the existing tower at the front of the church, she said she wanted to balance the design of the building with a tower at the back of the building.

“There is a 9-foot difference between the tower in the front and the proposed tower in the back, but the tower in the back is set about 60 feet back from the road,” she said, “making the difference less noticeable.”

If the plan is approved, it will be about two months before the construction on the tower is completed, she said. This includes the installation of the equipment, which will be placed in the basement of the church.

James said the church had no objections to the plans, because AT&T would use space that is unused by the church.

No one from the church was available for comment.

William Hammett, president of Hammett & Edison Inc., is a consulting engineer with expertise in radio frequency (RF) exposure and making sure companies comply with the Federal Communications Commission’s Telecommunications Act of 1996.

He said the 1996 Act sought to promote competition between companies that provided similar technologies to provide a specific type of service, and this site is well below those standards.

Hammett also explained the electromagnetic spectrum and that the waves emitted from a cell tower are non-ionizing radiation, meaning they don’t damage a person’s DNA like ionizing radiation does.

Examples of non-ionizing radiation include power lines, AM and FM radios and microwaves, while ionizing radiation can be found in ultraviolet and X-rays. It is ionizing radiation that is dangerous to a person’s health, Hammett said.

A member of the church and resident of Mountain View, who chose to remain unnamed, said she was at the meeting, because “her first concern was the health issues,” but after Hammett explained to her about ionization, her concerns are gone.

“The city explained it and said it was OK” she said. “I wanted to find out as a member of the church to let others know if they had questions.”