Earlier this month, Tampa attorney and business owner Stacy Frank announced that she would run for the Democratic party nomination in State House District 57, currently occupied for one more year by Republican Fay Culp, who is then term-limited out.
Democrats representing Hillsborough County in the state Capitol have been scant in recent years, but local party leaders have high hopes that with open seats like HD 57 (one of three open House seats in the county for 2010), they might begin to make inroads on the GOP hegemony in Tallahassee.
But in addition to getting through a Democratic primary (where little-known attorney Cliff Somers has already declared his candidacy) and what surely will be a competitive race with a Republican, Stacy Frank also needs to contend with a group of residents who have been at war with her over the past year over the issue of cell phone towers.
As president of Collier Enterprises II, Frank's company was awarded an exclusive agreement with the Hillsborough County School District to place cell phone towers on county school campuses back in 2006. The deal included paying 50 percent of the rental revenues to the school district, who then send 40 percent back to the individual participating school.
But in January, a group of parents and concerned citizens in South Tampa successfully rose up against the placement of such a tower at Coleman Middle School. They've remained organized ever since, and some of them reacted furiously when they learned that Frank now wants to represent them in Tallahassee.
Lisa Williams was one such citizen. Speaking on the day that Frank announced her candidacy, Williams was vehement in her opposition, claiming that Frank's advocacy for the cell phone towers this year showed "that she's not there to help our families."
Williams said that day she had received over 30 phone calls and/or e-mails, and said she planned to hold a meeting sometime soon to discuss "strategy," presumably to try to upend Frank's candidacy.
Another activist on the cell phone tower issue, South Tampa resident Bill Cook, says he believes that Frank "does not have the best interests of the community at heart."
Both Williams and Cook have been prominent voices in the group that calls itself People Against Cell Towers at Schools, led by South Tampa resident Carrie Grimail. All three are Democrats.
Grimail emphasizes that her anger is not directed at Stacy Frank the person, but at her role as the head of Collier Enterprises II. She says Frank was disrespectful and dismissive when she first encountered her, "and that doesn't make for a good legislator." Grimail has a PowerPoint presentation that she shows neighborhood association groups and reporters who want a quick primer on the group's case against cell phone towers and their belief that much of the actions that have transpired between Collier Enterprises II and the Hillsborough County School District have not been transparent.
Among the charges they make: "blatant misrepresentations, hiding parties to the contracts, and the School Board's abrogation of responsibilities."
Underlying their opposition to the cell phone towers is their fear of the radio frequencies (or RF's) that the towers generate. Though the school board has generally dismissed the possibility that there could be anything unsafe about them, the South Tampa parents have done extensive research in questioning that premise.
Although the 55-year-old Frank has never run for public office, she's hardly unaware that politics can be a combat sport. She has been steeped in the world of public service for much of her life: her father is retired appeals court Judge Richard Frank, and her mother is the revered Pat Frank, now serving as Hillsborough County's clerk of the court — a woman who generates such good will in South Tampa that political consultant Vic DiMaio, who said he spent months persuading Stacy to run, calls her network of supporters "the Pat Frank machine."
Stacy Frank said she recalls watching committee meetings and votes while her mother was serving in the State Senate in the 1970s. She graduated from Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service in Washington D.C. and told CL earlier this month, "I had these great visions of going abroad." But she lost her enthusiasm for going overseas after the Iranian hostage crisis unfolded, and ultimately attended Florida State to get her law degree.
Frank has no regrets about the way she has handled the cell phone issue. "I'm very proud of what I've been doing," she says, insisting that she has followed legal procedures every step of the way, and she rejects the notion that her business stance has in any way showed a lack of sensitivity, particularly regarding children.
"Wireless is an emergency response device," she says. "Over 500,00 phone calls are made by wireless for emergency service. Equally important is we were providing economic opportunities for schools… in 2010, schools will make over a quarter of a million dollars," she added, before repeating, "I'm very proud of what I'm doing."
Questions remain whether the cell phone tower activists will have any impact on Frank's candidacy. Some observers dismiss them, such as Tampa City Councilwoman and Frank supporter Linda Saul-Sena, who says the process worked at Coleman Middle School. She doesn't understand the neighborhood activists' "continued stridency."
Tampa Democrat Alan Clendenin is an enthusiastic Frank supporter who smells victory in District 57 next year. In his opinion, the financial benefits that the schools enjoy through their contract with Collier outweigh any deleterious concerns. Of the critics he says, "Shame on them. They don't allow people to have their opinion, and then they make personal attacks."
Pearl Chiarenza's son attends Cimino Elementary School in Valrico. The St Petersburg Times reported earlier this year that the school board and Cimino made an agreement on a cell phone tower back in May of '08, but didn't inform parents about the towers until this past January. Nevertheless, Chiarenza says she doesn't have safety concerns, and is excited that the school will get $250,000 out of the deal. "In my opinion, the parents against cell towers are using scare tactics," she says.
Officials with some of the schools that have received funding for allowing the construction of the towers are some of the biggest advocates for the partnership between Collier II and the school district.
Anna Brown is the principal of Witter Elementary School, situated in a low-income area near the USF Tampa campus, where 93 percent of the students receive free or reduced school lunches. Brown calls the partnership with Collier "absolutely positive" and says she has no thoughts or concerns about any potential ill effects of having a tower on her campus."That money allows us to provide materials for teachers and students."
The only other Democrat to declare for the race in District 57, Cliff Somers, says he "suspects [the cell phone tower issue] may come up" during the campaign. "There are people out there who I think want to help me for that reason."
Tampa City Councilwoman Mary Mulhern says that she's been approached by "many" people to run for the seat as well, and says she won't rule out a possible candidacy (though she adds that she likes Frank, and would support her if she is the candidate next year).
One of the few issues that friends and foes of cell phone towers can agree upon is that there should be adequate notice and information distributed to the community about such installations. Though an agreement between the Hillsborough County School District and Collier II in 2006 stated that notifications would happen, school board spokeswoman Linda Cobbe said it's only been in the past year and a half that such hearings have been held. (At the request of cell phone tower opponents, the Hillsborough County Commission agreed in February to require public hearings before issuing permits for the towers.)
When concerned parents called the district this year to express their worries about the potential negative effects of the towers, they were informed that an "expert" on the issue would call them back to address their concerns. That expert was none other than Stacy Frank, who, as critics charge, is an attorney with no background in engineering or bio-medical issues, but she did and does directly benefit from advocating for the safety of the towers.
But what about the science? Are such cell phone towers really dangerous, or are the concerns a result of a bunch of hopped-up citizens who have the free time to pester local governments? As the Tampa Bay mainstream media has reported throughout the year, there are major disagreements among scientists regarding the safety of such towers (with one of the biggest sources of disagreement being whether it's enough to look only at short-term acute effects vs. studies over a longer time).
The Hillsborough School Board used a local environmental engineering group, Chastain Skillman, to do such a study on the safety of the towers back in December of 2008, and the consultants reported that things were a-okay. (The official who worked on the issue in Hillsborough County did not return our phone call for comment.)
And the American Cancer Society has said that limited epidemiological evidence suggests no link between cancers and living or working near a cell phone tower. The ACS says that the energy level of radio waves coming off cell towers is too low to cause any noticeable human health impacts, and that a person would have to stand right in front of an antenna to pick up even trace amounts of radiation. The ACS has also said that unlike X-rays or gamma rays, radio-frequency electromagnetic radiation is "non-ionizing," meaning it lacks the gusto to break the bonds that hold molecules (like DNA) in cells together.
But B. Blake Levitt, a former New York Times science reporter and the award-winning author of the 1995 book, Electromagnetic Fields, A Consumer's Guide To The Issues And How To Protect Ourselves, disagrees.
In particular, Levitt cites a 2007 study called the BioInitiative Report that says that the most serious incidents from RF's can happen at the lowest frequencies to the human body, and says such low-level radiation can be damaging.
An editor of that study, environmental consultant Cindy Sage, has written that RF radiation can ultimately result in altered DNA, increased risk of cancer, impaired or delayed healing and premature aging.
Whether that study is definitive or not is obviously debatable. What is not is that those who are worried about the safety of the towers are by no means limited to what Carrie Grimail jokingly refers to as "the desperate housewives of South Tampa."
Earlier this year, in Portland, Oregon, the city council wrote to its congressional delegation, urging them to ask the FCC and the FDA to conduct new studies to determine the potential health hazards related to cell phone towers and the emissions from radio frequencies. A short time later, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution asking the federal government for local control and regulation of the siting of wireless devices. (L.A. has always been a beacon of concerns about the towers; in 2000, the L.A. Unified School District banned cell towers on school properties because of the debate on whether RF emissions have negative health effects on people.)
In February, a French court ordered a phone company to dismantle cell phone base towers in the Lyons area based on the potential health risk for nearby residents.
And in April, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution on health concerns associated with Electromagnetic Fields, which says cell towers should not be placed near schools, places of worship, retirement homes and health care institutions.
The question raised by scientists are not limited simply to cell phone towers, but also to cell phones and other wireless technologies that have become dominant worldwide in just the past decade.
It's unlikely that such scientific debates will manifest themselves in an election for a state House seat that encompasses South Tampa, Westchase and Town N' Country in 2010. And it's possible that Stacy Frank will benefit rather than suffer from being a cell tower ambassador because of the financial rewards the towers have provided schools. But in the sometimes absurd world that is Hillsborough County politics, one can never predict which issues will sway the electorate — and the concerns of the "desperate housewives of South Tampa" are real.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2009.