Last night over a dozen people spoke out against a proposed cell phone tower that would be placed on the grounds of Buchanan Middle School in north Tampa.
The issue over cell phone towers on Hillsborough County School campuses has been a hot one over the past year, and was recently documented in a story in CL last month.
The contract between the school district and Collier Enterprises II puts the discretion of allowing such towers in the hands of school principals. Community support is critical, which is why an uprising by local parents blocked such a tower from being erected at Coleman Middle School in south Tampa.
However, for critics who think such towers are unsafe because of possible radiofrequency radiation, a provision of law included in the 1996 Telecommunication Act does not allow zoning boards like the Hillsborough County Zoning Master to take such comments into consideration.
As journalist B. Blake Levitt has written,
Zoning officials today are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to siting cellular-phone towers or other antenna installations mounted on, or in, pre-existing buildings. Legally, they can't refuse them or, supposedly, design zoning regulations based on health effects, no matter how convincing the scientific evidence or how militant community members become. Any community that tries to challenge the safety of cellular towers based on the "environmental" effects of radio-frequency (RF) emissions stands to end up in federal court. Several communities already have.
Therefore, last night citizens and their attorneys whose property is within the site of the proposed 160-foot tower came out to criticize the tower as a potential hazard, because it lies in the so called, "fall zone."
Certified urban planner Sam Casella says the tower could lead to potential property value damage, while environmental attorney Ralf Brookes, representing Ellen and Lee Vaughan, said the procedure has violated due process because the Hillsborough County School Board has not followed through on public record requests for memos of site leases for antennas, and other documents.
Also speaking out was Mark Boker, president of the Woodbriar Homeowners Association, who questioned in an op-ed published in Monday's Tampa Tribune why the school board has put the decision in the hands of school principals, writing:
Why have our elected officials shirked their responsibility and turned these far-reaching decisions over to school principals? Our schools are entering long-term contracts, which expose them to liabilities from future lawsuits. Should our school system and taxpayers be exposed to such risks?
The main reason principals (and parents) say they welcome the towers is because of the income that they provide the school. But a couple of citizens mentioned the fact that the school district has now received an unprecedented bounty in the form of a $100 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and that such funding from the towers shouldn't be so critical. One woman also suggesting it was equally wrong when the school district made a deal with Pepsi to host soda machines in school campuses ( a deal that the school board cut short last year).
Zoning Hearing master James Scarola will have 15 days to decide if it's appropriate to house the tower at Buchanan.
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.