City imposes moratorium

CITY HALL — The City Council voted 4 to 0 Tuesday to immediately impose a 45-day moratorium on all wireless cellular antennas in residential neighborhoods, sending the issue into uncharted territory as City Hall turns its attention to developing an overall city policy for telecommunications facilities.

The council also voted to hire two communications law firms to assist the city with developing a possible ordinance that could establish a city review process for all future cellular antenna applications.

The votes came a week after dozens of opponents to a T-Mobile USA Inc. plan to construct a “micro-cell” site inside a lamppost on the city’s right-of-way on the 500 block of Cumberland Road appealed to the City Council to block the project at least temporarily until a governing policy for cellular antennas could be enacted.

Residents of the upscale northwest Glendale neighborhood have for weeks protested the T-Mobile antenna on aesthetic grounds and fears of potential negative impacts to public health and property values.

Their numbers were far less Tuesday than the nearly 100 people who crammed council chambers last week, but organizers of a growing opposition campaign said they were in it for the long haul.

“We have to make sure everyone knows how passionate we still are about the issue,” said John McMahon, a main organizer for Glendale Organized Against Cell Towers and owner of the property next to the planned T-Mobile antenna.

With Councilman Frank Quintero absent, the council voted unanimously to impose the moratorium Tuesday over the objections of T-Mobile, whose senior manager for engineering development, Clark Harris, again asked for the matter to be dropped in favor of good-faith negotiations toward a “reasonable and quick solution.”

After the vote, Harris said his company would remain committed to working with residents and city officials on the issue of micro-cell sites, which have begun to proliferate the hillsides of the Los Angeles basin in response to what telecommunications companies say is an increase in customer demand to shore up so-called dead spots.

“We feel we could have achieved the same objective without the moratorium,” Harris said.

He declined to say how far T-Mobile would allow the process to play out before using the legal system to invoke federal provisions that largely shield wireless telecommunications equipment from municipal oversight.