Residents rage over antennas

LA CRESCENTA — County planning commissioners on Wednesday approved 12 cellular antennas for the rooftop of a Foothill Boulevard office building, infuriating its tenants and nearby residents who say the equipment could pose health risks and wreck local aesthetics.

Opponents of the project on Thursday vowed to appeal the unanimous decision of the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission to allow Sprint-Nextel to erect the 6-foot-tall cellular antennas and a global positioning system antenna behind screens atop the three-story office building at 2450 Foothill Blvd.

Chris Workman, who lives behind the building in the 2500 block of Community Avenue, said she and her husband, Glen, would file the $775 appeal to the county Board of Supervisors and seek help from the community in forming a coalition in opposition to the project.

“We are doing it not just for ourselves,” she said. “I will not live here with another (antenna) in my face. Enough’s enough.”

Federal regulatory agencies maintain that telecommunications facilities, including cellular antennas and towers, do not pose a significant health risk to nearby residents, but opponents of the equipment say those findings are based on ambiguous research.

Local governments and commissions have, under the Federal Telecommunications Act of 1996, been unable to consider the potential ill health effects of radio waves or radiation when hearing an application to install communications equipment, forcing opponents to center their protests on aesthetic grounds.

Even then, architectural masking — fake trees, paneling, textures and other tools — has often been enough to persuade local land-use commissions and court judges to approve the applications.

“It’s almost like, what can we do?” said Kristen Wheatley, an employee of Monarch E&S Insurance Services, which occupies the entire first floor of the 2540 Foothill Blvd. building.

Executives for the company, which recently re-signed a 10-year lease for the space, said their employees feared the antennas’ potential health effects so much that several have threatened to leave the company.

With that in mind, Monarch managers on Thursday said that if the antennas cannot be blocked, they will consider breaking their lease and moving elsewhere.