Residents in an unincorporated area adjacent to Los Altos have dialed up their opposition to the installation of a second cellphone tower at Christ Episcopal Church.
In 2003, representatives of the church – located at 1040 Border Road – met with neighbors to secure support for a Verizon Communications Inc. cellphone tower, lodged in the church’s steeple. Last year, AT&T officials approached church leadership with a proposal to construct another cell tower in the steeple.
Because the church had already solicited approval from neighbors for the original cellphone tower, officials believed they could pursue the AT&T contract without notifying neighbors, according to Carol Millie, a member of the church’s vestry.
Pamela Wu, architectural site approval secretary for Santa Clara County, said the county viewed the project as a colocation of the cellphone tower, which does not require an additional public hearing.
The contracts for the cell towers generate revenue for the church. While Millie could not say how much Christ Episcopal will earn from hosting the towers, she offered that the amount was nowhere near the $200,000 a year that several neighbors had claimed.
After the church moved forward with the second installation, scheduled by the end of August, neighbors noticed the construction and registered their complaints.
“I don’t think they achieved the goal of notifying the community,” said Danny Huang, whose family lives in the neighborhood. “We didn’t know about the cell tower until it was being put up.”
Residents said they were concerned about the towers’ low-frequency magnetic-field emissions and potential side effects for neighborhood children and those attending the church’s Ventana School.
At a recent neighborhood meeting scheduled to discuss expanding Ventana’s enrollment from preschool/kindergarten through sixth grade, neighbors expressed their reservations about the cell tower.
“We were expecting the comments to be on the traffic,” Millie said. “Instead the neighbors were up in arms over the cell tower. We were shocked, actually – no one had said anything to us about the cell towers before that.”
Following the meeting, the church hired an independent consultant to share cell-tower emissions research with neighbors and school parents. The consultant concluded, Millie said, that there are “no cancer-causing, cell-changing emissions” from cell towers.
“The emissions from talking on a cellphone are stronger,” she said. “The independent consultant said that if you want a comparison, it is most like the emissions a baby monitor would emit.”
Despite the lack of scientific evidence on the dangers of cell-tower emissions, residents said they are still worried.
“The beams go directly into the homes,” said neighbor Roger Bishop. “My personal concern is why they won’t address the shielding of beams that go into these people’s homes. I’m concerned for the children.”
Millie said that to assuage parents’ and neighbors’ fears, when the tower is operable later this month, AT&T will measure emissions and report the findings to the church. She said the church has engaged its own consultant to monitor emissions. Once the numbers are in, the church will share the data with parents and neighbors.
“The neighborhood is concerned about whether they are getting radiated from this,” Millie said. “Everything we have been able to read from the government – it just doesn’t appear that that is true.”
