12/02/2003 Meeting Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Council Minutes of 12/Z/Z003 environmental effects of a cell tower when considering a location, then we can't. Mrs. Puinno said there is a difference between health and environmental. Sprint has access to other areas in the city. It's too bad they don't want to use them. The city cannot be sued as they offered other areas. Law Director Dubelko said it is not a question of being fearful of being sued. It's a question of lawyers being responsible and making sure that they properly advise their clients to follow the law. As he has indicated from the start, and Mr. Gareau has ably stated, we have federal laws here which control our actions. We have a limited area to work within. Three or four years ago, the city government hired an expert and planned. The plan that was proposed is continuing to be implemented. Todd Hunt, the telecommunications expert that the city hired, looked at everything and recommended from the start that, when we provide these locations throughout the city, one of those areas be the various school district properties throughout the city. Because they are, generally speaking, larger pieces of property on which you can site the towers and have the distances that you need to keep away from nearby residences. And they are spread throughout the city. Council didn't fully implement all of his recommendations. Council was reluctant to go ahead and zone those without the school board first coming forward and asking for the zoning. City Council, upon being requested by the school board to zone this into the supplemental classification consistent with the recommendations of our planner several years ago, is acting consistent with the plan if they do that. Mrs. Puinno said she is asking that this go back into committee. Charles Dial, 27959 Gardenia. • Regarding the cell phone tower issue, the city's right to legislate in this area exists solely at the pleasure of the federal government. Sprint cell phones operate on almost the exact radio frequencies as a microwave oven. Microwave ovens typically have radio transmitters in them probably at least 100 times more powerful than the tower being considered. All microwave ovens leak, and what is leaking out of the microwave ovens of the neighbors in that area is a higher powered RF field than that tower could ever conceivably produce. So far as tower placement is concerned, there are basically two considerations. If you're dealing with a sparse spread-out population, because of the cost of towers you're going to have a smaller number of taller more powerful towers to reach that area. In a very high density area, like the area near Metro General Hospital, the cell towers are close together and very low. It is possible to engineer the towers to have many, many miles of coverage. Sometimes when you have a lot of users in the area, you don't want to engineer it that way. You want to engineer it for a very limited coverage and that means very low power. As far as the public health and safety is concerned because of world conditions (the electrical power grid, terrorism), we need all the redundancy we can get in our communications. There is a health and safety issue in having good cellular communications to back up other things and to twist that inside out into a public danger is morally unconscionable in his opinion. • On the water and sewer issue, he believes a simple solution would be that those residents who wish to receive a credit present their bills once a year. A extra temporary clerk in the Finance Department can manually check them to determine the amount of credit. 13 K .~