A cell phone tower “disguised” as a eucalyptus tree is slated to serve residents of Orcutt from a small patch of green off Kenneth Avenue, but neighboring homeowners say they don’t want it.
“I really appreciate the view from my backyard of a natural environment,” Vincent Arce said. “And I don’t think a fake tree, 80 feet tall, is going to appreciate the value of my property.”
Arce spoke about his issues with the “stealthy” tower at the March 11 Santa Barbara County Planning Commission meeting. Verizon Wireless had three separate proposed cell phone tower sites on the agenda at that meeting.
And while commissioners unanimously approved (with conditions) construction on two of the cell tower sites—one on Black Road to serve the Tanglewood development and the other on Mora Avenue in Santa Ynez—they pushed a decision on the Kenneth site to the March 25 meeting.
Verizon representative Jay Higgins said the company needs the towers to fill gaps in service because of the increased demand for cell service—both calls and data use—in residential areas. Therefore, the towers need to be strategically placed to serve people using their phones at home.
“You are aware the demand for service is requiring these to be placed in residential areas,” Higgins said during the meeting. “This is what is happening with our industry, and I’m not going to say it’s just an industry thing. It’s about human behavior. … We are replacing the telephone network, and it has to be above ground.”
Neighbors to the would-be Kenneth tower were vocal during the hearing, clapping and vocalizing while other speakers were at the podium. They asked the commission to give them more time to raise opposition to the tower, saying it would disrupt the natural environment of a park, including potentially destroying some of the eucalyptus trees it would be installed next to. Residents said they were also worried about radio frequency emissions generated by the tower and noise from a back-up generator.
The hubbub raised by Orcutt residents is pretty similar to a November 2014 cell tower discussion held in Lompoc, where residents were against having a Verizon tower installed in a residential area. The tree-like tower was approved, and construction will go ahead as planned.
Lompoc’s Broadband Services Administrator Richard Graycyk works with cell phone companies such as Verizon when it comes to the nuts and bolts of a tower’s initial planning stages. He said cell towers have always been in residential areas and have always been subject to a “particular kind of scrutiny,” but also said he was speaking to the Sun purely as someone who has experience with the industry. Lompoc has seen five big Verizon sites proposed and approved around town in the last couple of years, he said.
“Landlines aren’t exactly proliferating. … The cell phone companies need to provide more capacity, there’s not doubt about that,” he said, adding that people are using cell phones for more than just phone calls and texts. “It’s almost like magical, what you have [access to] when you walk around town. But again, there’s a cost. … It takes a lot of infrastructure to serve all that.”
This article appears in Mar 19-26, 2015.