MARTY GRAHAM

Staff Writer

SAN DIEGO -- County supervisors voted 4-0 Wednesday to write an ordinance setting standards for locating new cellular phone antennas.

The board had intended to approve a design policy, but learned Wednesday that it would need an ordinance, which takes about nine months to finish, to make its policy ideas work.

Meanwhile, wireless industry experts -- San Diego County has the second-largest wireless industry presence in the nation -- reminded the board that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 restricts county objections to towers to aesthetic issues.

With 27 towers in place and applications for another 110 countywide, wireless communication towers have become a hot issue for the public. In the past year, residents from Ramona, Bonsall, Fallbrook, Cardiff and many South County neighborhoods have fought to keep the towers out of residential areas.

Residents from all over the county, including Rancho Santa Fe, Spring Valley and Alpine, came to the Wednesday meeting to fight to have their concerns heard.

Residents of the Whispering Palms area in Rancho Santa Fe hired an expert, Cindy Sage, to talk to the board about their health concerns.

"There is a split in the world community about what is safe for the public," she said. "Some studies published in medical journals show health effects at low levels of exposure."

As yet, there is no consensus in the medical community about whether or not such exposure is harmful to people's health.

Sage told the board that some countries have set far lower standards for safe exposure to microwave radiation generated by the towers. While the U.S. standard is 580 units of exposure, some countries, including Russia, China, Switzerland and Italy, have set safe limits at less than 10 units.

She said that concealing the towers, as the board requires, means that people won't know the towers are nearby when they decide whether or not to live in a neighborhood.

But a wireless industry representative, who refused to give her name outside the meeting, said the county could not look at health questions.

"It is the industry's position that the perceived health risks are the cause for attempts to restrict siting," she said. "Federal law prohibits the county from doing that."

Instead, the board focused on visual restrictions, including concealing towers to look like palm trees, bell towers or making them part of existing buildings.

The board also wanted to make it harder to get permits to build such towers in residential areas to encourage companies to look at commercial and industrial areas.

But all of those ideas move again to the back burner while county staff works to write an ordinance, have it approved by planning groups and the public and bring it back to the board in the next year.

4/26/01