Stevens County puts cell towers on hold

COLVILLE – Stevens County commissioners imposed a moratorium this week on construction of new cellular telephone towers so they can catch up with Spokane County and other areas that already have come to grips with the giant hat racks.

While questions of aesthetics, safety and long-term health effects are familiar in urban areas, they are relatively new in rural northeastern Washington. Until recently, most cell towers have been on mountaintops.

Some residents think that’s where they should remain.

The problem is that more and more people are using cell phones, and they expect them to work. Mountaintop sites allow a single tower to cover a huge area, but their capacity is limited and they miss a lot of nooks and crannies in the shadows of smaller mountains.

Quartzite Mountain, the scenic backdrop for the city of Chewelah, is one of those smaller mountains. A company that develops cell towers for phone companies proposed a tower at the base of Quartzite Mountain about three years ago, and Chewelah city officials were able to block it only because they had declared the mountain part of a “view corridor” in state growth management planning documents.

Now, more towers are planned elsewhere in the area, and county officials have an empty toolkit when residents complain. The county has no zoning except in the Loon Lake area.

Commissioner Merrill Ott hopes the six-month moratorium will give the county time to pass an ordinance striking a balance between rural aesthetics and good telephone service.

Commissioners will conduct a public hearing at 3 p.m. Aug. 3 in the county courthouse in Colville to find out what people want in a cell-tower ordinance. Ott said he thinks an ordinance can be developed within six months by borrowing ideas from codes adopted elsewhere, but the moratorium could be extended to a year if necessary.

Ott acknowledges a “huge irony” in the fact that zoning laws that could preserve rural lifestyles have been highly unpopular among rural residents.

“You can’t use the ‘Z word,’ ” he said, but a politically acceptable cell-tower ordinance can accomplish the same things by specifying where towers can be located and what must be done to make them less obtrusive.

“It’s been a laid-back county for how long?” Ott mused. “But we’re getting a population now, and we need to develop the infrastructure appropriately.”

Cell phone coverage in the Chewelah area, served by transmitters on Chewelah Mountain, is notoriously spotty. Cellular phone companies are starting to fill the gaps with towers on the floor of the scenic Colville Valley. Verizon is building one a couple of miles west of Chewelah, and Cingular wants to build one about three miles northwest of town on U.S. Highway 395.

About two dozen neighbors of the proposed Cingular tower collected 84 signatures on a petition and lobbied commissioners to protect them from what they say will be a 190-foot-tall eyesore that bombards them with potentially harmful radio waves.

“It’s close enough that I’m going to need to wear a tin hat,” Lisa Hixson joked, noting that some inconclusive studies have suggested electromagnetic radiation may cause cancer.

Although she worries about the effects on her children from having a cell tower about a quarter-mile from her home, Hixson is mostly concerned that 20-story towers will sprout every few miles along Highway 395 and spoil the rural scenery she cherishes.

“This is just the first of many coming in,” she said, noting telephone companies offer attractive lease payments for tower sites. “Most people in Stevens County can use $500 a month, but I don’t think that should be the reason to trash up this beautiful valley.”

In fact, cell phone companies secured a half-dozen building permits in 2001 for towers from one end of the valley to the other. But the recession hammered the telecommunications industry, and all but one of those permits – the Verizon site west of Chewelah – lapsed without construction.

The moratorium commissioners imposed Monday won’t affect the Cingular tower, which already had a valid building permit application in process. Neighbors have retained an attorney to fight the tower, but avenues of attack are limited. Besides the lack of zoning, federal law preempts any successful challenge on health grounds.

“It leaves us nothing but environmental,” said Cingular opponent Lola Connelly. “We aren’t a lot of environmentalists, but we will use it if we have to save lives.”

As people do throughout Stevens County when they want to stop a project, the tower opponents are looking for weaknesses in the federally required environmental review of the Cingular project.

Connelly and her neighbors hoped to persuade Cingular to “co-locate” its transmitters on the nearby Verizon tower already under construction, but Cingular spokeswoman Lauren Garner said the Verizon site “would still leave a gap in our service area.”

Garner said Cingular tries to make its towers as unobtrusive as possible, and noted that its proposed Chewelah-area site would be next to an existing power line. As for health effects, Garner said scientific studies have not shown ground-level exposure to radiation from transmission towers to be harmful.

“It is important to note that typical exposure levels from an antenna site are less than that of many familiar products such as cordless phones or CB radios, and are hundreds to thousands of times lower than allowed by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) for public exposure,” Garner said. self end