City Council OKs Guidelines for New Cell Towers

The Agoura Hills City Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to adopt an ordinance offering guidelines for the possible future construction of new cell phone towers and other wireless facilities in more areas of the city, including school zones.

"The new guidleines will give the council greater flexibility in making decisions on new cell tower applications coming to the city," said Mayor Harry Schwarz.

A previous city ordinance allowed the cell phone towers only to be built exclusively at business parks throughout the city, which left significant gaps in wireless coverage for many Agoura Hills residents, according to city officials.

After the city lost its legal battle to keep a T-Mobile cell phone tower from being constructed at in December 2010, the council was forced to reconsider the opening up of schools in Agoura Hills to new cell company developments, said Mike Kamino, the city's director of planning and community development.

"While the ordinance opens up the towers to more areas, they would be subject to greater scrutiny and regulatory controls," said Kamino.

That greater scrutiny includes the monitoring of radio frequency emissions from the towers, he said. Parents of students at Lindero in the past about exposing their children to these emissions.

However, the found in its of the RF emissions that there were no ill health effects and allowed the tower to be built.

The new ordinance requires engineers working on the towers to provide reports to the city to show that the structure's RF emissions will not exceed allowances mandated by the Federal Communications Commission.

The city was also concerned with the aesthetics of the new structures, and took this into consideration when drafting the ordinance. According to the new measure, wireless facilities must be built into existing structures, and cellphone towers are not allowed within 100 feet of a residential zone.

Representatives from the cell companies looking to expand into Agoura Hills took issue with several of the regulations in the new ordinance, most notably a noise requirement. Cellphone and wireless structures will have to undergo noise studies to make sure they will not be too loud for residents, said Verizon spokesperson Leslie Day of the ordinance.

Day said that the electrical generators that are used to power some of the structures produce a level of noise that would make it too difficult to meet the stated requirements. "The noise ordinance is unattainable in some instances…these [generators] are important to keep facilities operating in emergencies," she said.

She implored that the city be flexible in its future consideration of regulations, saying that "some of the equipment [used to provide wireless service] hasn't even been invented yet," meaning that the ordinance may become obsolete and not applicable.

However, Councilmember Denis Weber stressed the fact that flexibility was inherent in making a consideration.

In his final statements, Weber brought up some of the issues he had with the ordinance as it was drafted. "It's a bit too rigid as to where some of these antennas can go, but we've been wrestling with this for so, so long," he said. "I would hope that if this passes, the staff would find the flexibility…there's got to be common sense to it."

Councilmember William Koehler said he believed the ordinance fulfilled all of the requirements the city believed were important in allowing these new towers to be built. "None of those issues will keep a cellphone company from filling gaps. It'll be harder for their engineers, but they can do it," he said.