Viewpoints Clash Over Towers for Cellular Phones

Balancing the viewpoint of telephone companies with viewing points of homeowners is becoming a tall order, Los Angeles County officials learned Monday.

Sixty feet tall, in fact.

That is the height of a cellular telephone transmitting tower being built in Calabasas over the objections of area residents, who say it spoils the scenic view of a valley of Malibu Canyon and adjoining Santa Monica Mountain parkland.

The county’s Regional Planning Commission on Monday visited the transmitter site next to the Ventura Freeway at Las Virgenes Road to see what it looks like.

“With two competing companies starting to build these things, they’re going to be popping up all over the county,” planning staff member Richard Frazier said.

“They all look exactly alike,” he told the commissioners. “You see one, you’ve seen them all. I wanted you to see what it looks like so when the cases come up, you know what the problems are.”

Got 40% Decrease

Calabasas homeowners say the problem is the tower’s intrusion on views. They tried the same argument when they fought PacTel’s original proposal for a 100-foot tower in Calabasas, but managed only to wrangle a 40% decrease in its height from a county hearing officer.

The two phone companies building the towers say placement of the equipment is important if they are to provide reliable, static-free service to the estimated 80,000 Los Angeles-area motorists who use cellular phones in their cars.

The mobile phones use low-power radios to transmit calls to relay points at the towers. Telephone company officials say the $750,000 tower transmitters typically can handle 90 calls at a time, which means that increasing phone user demand will require additional towers in the future.

The main mobile phone service, PacTel Cellular, a unit of Pacific Telesis, has 60 towers in the Southern California area to serve about 50,000 mobile phones. Its lone FCC-licensed competitor, Los Angeles Cellular Telephone Co., has plans for 43 to handle its 30,000 customers.

Industry Is Growing

“As long as we’re growing, we’ll be negotiating for sites,” Ron Olexa, Los Angeles Cellular’s vice-president for operations and engineering, said Monday. “We’ll have separate towers from our competitors. But there’s a good possibility we could be at the same site.”

PacTel officials acknowledged Monday that tower-site hunting is tough.

“Los Angeles is hard to find good spots,” said Bette Bienstadt, a spokeswoman for PacTel Cellular. “You can’t say we’ve snapped up all the good spots, but we’ve had a 2 1/2-year head start.”

One spot they haven’t snapped up yet is in Agoura Hills, about five miles west of the new Calabasas tower location.

The Agoura Hills City Council unanimously rejected PacTel’s request to build a cellular tower on a hillside, ruling Thursday night that the site is designated to be permanent open space.

PacTel said it will ask for reconsideration on the ground that car phone service is important to Agoura Hills residents, just as regular phone service is with its conventional telephone poles on hillsides.

But the argument does not impress Norm Buehring, an Agoura resident who tried to fight PacTel’s application for the Calabasas tower when it came before a Los Angeles County hearing officer last year.

“They’re a private company out to make a buck from car phones,” Buehring said Monday. “This is not a public utility issue as far as I’m concerned. Putting a tower like this up can end up dictating the character of the area around it.”

David Brown, a Calabasas environmentalist and president of a coalition of residents called the Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation, said the Las Virgenes Road tower site is particularly irksome because taxpayers “spent millions” to preserve the views of distant mountains.

County planning commission Chairman Lee Strong said his panel will carefully evaluate the height of towers proposed in the future. The county recently required PacTel to relocate a tower planned near Magic Mountain in the Valencia area, he said.