Lamorinda's Cell Towers: "Hey, We'll Just Flock It and Call It a Christmas Tree"

The mushroom-like proliferation of cell phone towers in Lamorinda has many people shaking their heads, others calling for restrictions on additional towers, and still others carefully looking the other way.

The issue, , has engendered new interest -- and angst -- as communications companies and local residents eager for their dollars appear willing to go to ludicrous new heights to put the towers in place.

"They're everywhere and they look like hell," offered Moragan Tom Hartman, surveying a stand of spiky towers on the hill behind Saint Mary's College recently. "It's almost as if they go up overnight. In the morning you look up and they're there."

Lafayette, which has its share of "faux tree towers," and which recently saw plans to raise a local church steeple in order to accommodate even more equipment, appears to be moving toward an ordinance regulating what towers should look like, where they will go, and how the city should deal with requests to erect one within city limits.

In the meantime, locals are left shaking their heads.

"I call it the 'Fakest Tree in Lafayette,'" said life-long Lafayette resident Aric Martinez of a poorly camouflaged "cell tree" behind the Contra Costa Jewish Day School. "I spotted it from the Reservoir parking lot and hiked up the hill to snap a 'dang' picture. I thought 'I need to see that up close because it's so obviously fake.'"

Some companies attempt to camouflage the towers, others offer impressive amounts of "rent" to the owners of existing and "suitably high" local landmarks to install them -- one portable tower was merely wheeled onto the Saint Mary's College campus in Moraga, painted to blend in with the surrounding hillsides, and erected. It was burglarized for its expensive parts weeks later.

Local cities and towns, especially so in Lafayette, are being inundated with applications for more towers and are scurrying to draft an effective method of dealing with the requests.

Many are looking to others for guidance, but the technology is so new, and the money to "host" the towers so crisp and plentiful, that city planners admit they're behind the trend and playing "catch-up."

Small groups of residents, usually living in the area of a proposed or existing tower, are beginning to question their proliferation -- citing concerns about visual blight and the impact of potential health risks.

Burton Valley residents recently appealed a decision to put a T-Mobile antenna in the bell tower at St. Anselm's Episcopal Church -- already home to Verizon Wireless equipment -- and raising the church steeple to hold the new gear.

Neighbors noted the irony of heightening a church steeple in order to house telecommunications equipment and pressed city officials and T-Mobile representatives to prove their claims that a "coverage gap" was affecting Burton Valley residents' ability to make calls.

Burton Valley resident Angela Lucas asked the city council to consider temporarily banning new cell towers while the Lafayette drafts a wireless ordinance.

Answers to her questions, and others who have begun to question the towers, are expected when industry experts, city officials and residents gather to reexamine the issue in January.