Approximately two dozen people, many wearing yellow t-shirts calling out Democratic House District 57 candidate Stacy Frank, protested in a South Tampa strip mall Monday afternoon against a proposed 150-foot cell phone tower that could soon be erected there, if the Tampa City Council approves the zoning variance when it comes back before them this Thursday.
Last month, the Council voted to give Frank's company, F&L Towers, a permit to install the cell phone tower in South Tampa. Two neighborhood associations voted unanimously to oppose the project.
Jay Lenney is president of the Culbreath Heights Civic Association, one of two neighborhood associations that went before the council to urge rejection of Frank's application. He's angry that the company has so far been allowed a variance from city law, which allows construction of towers to be only 80 feet high. "They ought to just comply with the current laws," he said. "The city set up a long time ago where these towers can be set up, how tall they can be; if they fall over on this condo that's 80 feet over there, I feel sorry for that swimming pool…so there's some common sense that they are completely missing. "
Cynthis Shellenbarger said if F&L Towers is granted a variance, it will "open up the floodgates for wifi towers to go all the way down Manhattan, all the way down Henderson. When you go before the variance board, they won't give you two feet. They're going to give this woman 70 feet? It's absurd."
Shellenbarger also mentioned the increasing health concerns about cellular technology. "If people don't think there's a concern, I think it's because the industry doesn't want them to have a concern. We really do need to be concerned." Shellenbarger said that she and some of her other fellow protesters have invited Hillsborough County School Board members and other elected officials to attend a screening of a documentary this weekend that describes some of the health dangers associated with cellular technology. "We believe there's a lot misinformation out there," she said. "We're not people here with tinfoil on our heads, this is some serious business, and it takes a long , long, time , hours and hours of research to really understand it. It's not easy to understand, but I'm here to tell you, there's problems "
(The documentary is called Full Signal, and will be screened this Saturday morning at the Gasparilla International Film Festival. CL interviewed its director, Talal Jabari, and will post that story soon.)
Opposition to cell phone towers in Tampa began in earnest a little over a year ago at Coleman Middle School, which is situated not far from the site of Monday's demonstration. Bil Cook has been a leading spokesman for those activists. He says that the dangers of wireless technology echo similar problems with the tobacco industry and cigarettes. "I think some people just don't want to believe," he says of those who dismiss such concerns. "If you think back to when cigarettes were such a danger in our country and around the world, people were in denial about whether or not they were a cancer agent. And it took 70 years before it turned around."
This article appears in Mar 10-16, 2010.