The Los Angeles (L.A.) County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday unanimously agreed to delay its final vote on two ordinances that would allow for the fast-tracked proliferation of wireless infrastructure without due process and without residents’ right to appeal.

The five board members will seek experts’ opinions and discuss questions raised by constituents during a closed session on Dec. 20. The board scheduled another public hearing and the final vote for Jan. 10, 2023.

Commenting on the delayed vote, Janice Hahn, board chair, said, “We have a lot of questions and a lot of those came up during public comment.”

Children’s Health Defense (CHD) attorney W. Scott McCollough said:

“Today’s vote is significant because Los Angeles County is the largest county in the nation by population. Its actions influence what happens elsewhere. The result here will soon be exported to other local jurisdictions.”

Brenda Martinez — an L.A. County resident and activist on the executive committee of Fiber First Los Angeles County, a nonprofit that promotes fiber optic networks, agreed:

“The Dec. 6 vote has major precedent-setting implications in other cities. Other smaller municipalities seem to look up to the county for guidance. Everyone’s eyes and ears are on the county’s decisions.

“What made this happen was the enormous response from the public: thousands of emails sent out to the supervisors and over 300 pages of comments in opposition on the county portal website.”

McCollough, a former Texas assistant attorney general and telecom and administrative law attorney, said the delayed vote was the result of “democracy at work,” but the fight is not over.

“We must defeat ordinances that institute a rubber-stamp process for cell towers by eliminating public input, take away everyone’s property and privacy rights and allow thousands of towers to be placed in environmentally and historically sensitive areas without concern of the significant negative effects,” he said.

McCollough also told The Defender:

“The action alerts CHD ran on this issue generated a huge response and created great hesitancy by the board members, and the hard work on the ground by the local public interest groups securing so many people calling in or appearing in person got us over the top.”

Concerned citizens submitted “an overwhelming number of public comments” in opposition to the ordinances and the board members “simply did not want to vote against their constituents,” McCollough said.

CHD generated more than 15,000 comments before Tuesday’s meeting, via an action alert.

“Simply put, the politicians got scared, so they delayed,” McCollough said.

Susan Foster, co-founder of the nonprofit California Fires & Firefighters, who attended the meeting said she was “not surprised the supervisors decided to postpone” their decision, “given all the opposition to the passage of these two wireless ordinances that are deeply telecom-friendly.”

Foster added:

“This postponement shows that a majority of the supervisors are starting to recognize the fact that if they don’t protect the residents from cell towers in their front yards they will be voted out of office. It’s that simple.”

CHD and several of the other public interest organizations are prepared to take legal action against the county if the ordinances pass, McCollough said.

CHD is covering some of the legal costs for a woman in L.A. County who sued over a small cell placed on her property after the county staff unilaterally followed the “no notice or hearing” “ministerial” process they want the board to codify for small cells even though the current code does not allow that.

‘Thousands of wireless transmitters could pop up’ if ordinances pass

The two ordinances up for a vote in L.A. County are amendments to title 16 and title 22 of the Los Angeles County Code. These amendments seek to establish regulations for small cell wireless communication facilities in highways, as well as establish regulations for wireless facilities on private property in the unincorporated areas of L.A. County and associated provisions.

The proposed ordinances have been met with significant opposition from the public.

According to Fiber First L.A., if passed, the two ordinances “would remove public notice, setbacks, oversight, safety and environmental review, and any opportunities for appeal.”

Thousands of wireless transmitters could pop up across unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County in the next few years, Public News Service reported.

Tuesday’s meeting was the second reading of the proposed ordinances. The first took place on Nov. 15 when the board — in a 4 to 1 vote — granted preliminary approval.

Hilda Solis, who voted against the ordinances at the November meeting, on Tuesday said, “I think this opens up a can of worms, obviously, for a lot of us — and for me, I was pretty clear last time.”

Other board members, including Lindsey Horvath and Kathryn Barger, said they still had concerns about the cumulative impact of the proliferation of wireless cell towers and that those questions needed to be answered before voting on the ordinances.

Wireless towers pose fire risk, expert says

During the meeting, Foster — who has spent the last two decades advocating for firefighters who experienced neurological and immunological harm due to the presence of cell towers on their stations — testified about the dangers of wireless cell towers.

“Four major California wildfires in the last 15 years alone were started by telecommunications equipment,” she said. “Two of these fires — the Malibu Canyon Fire in 2007 and the devastating Woolsey Fire in 2018 — took place in L.A. County and caused over $6 billion in damages.”

Foster pointed out that “the guilty parties in those two fires were Southern California Edison, AT&T, Verizon, Sprint (now T-Mobile) and NextG (now Crown Castle)” and that the “California Public Utilities Commission accused every one of those parties of impeding the fire investigations.”

“Safety belongs to the county to regulate,” Foster said. “The FCC [Federal Communications Commission] never mandated that L.A. County burn itself to the ground.”

Until now, the county has required a conditional-use permit with public input on each wireless transmitter.

Do FCC rules necessitate fast-tracking wireless permit procedures?

Bruce Durbin, supervising regional planner in the county’s Department of Regional Planning, told Public News Service the conditional-use permit process with public input on each wireless transmitter had become problematic because the FCC requires government agencies to approve or deny them within two months.

“A conditional-use permit in California requires 30-days public notice, a public hearing in front of the commission,” Durbin said. “And to be able to approve that all within 60 days, it’s impossible.”

But McCollough disagreed. While L.A. County staff have argued that “the FCC ‘shot clock’ rules functionally (not legally) require elimination of public involvement since the processing time is so compressed,” that is not true, he said.

“They [L.A. County staff] claim they have no choice other than to rubber-stamp wireless applications.” However, “the FCC emphasized that its ‘shot clock’ rules do not preempt state and local rules requiring notice, hearing and environmental evaluations,” McCollough said.

He added:

“There is a way to accomplish the task within the compressed timeline. The key is ordinance provisions that detail all the information the staff and public needs to evaluate the application and identify issues. The applicant must be required to perform an environmental evaluation before [filing] the application. This streamlines the process because it will ensure only disputed issues — and usually there will be only a few of them — will have to be handled.”

“This is how the FCC does it for antenna registrations,” McCollough added.

According to McCollough, around roughly 2018 L.A. County unilaterally implemented a fast-tracked “ministerial” process — “that is bureaucrat-speak for ‘rubber stamp,’” he said — even though its policy guidance from 2010 says wireless permits must be handled using notice and comment and are not subject to ministerial treatment.

“Today’s vote was about codifying this process,” he said.

McCollough said that L.A. County staff adopted the idea of using a fast-tracked “ministerial” process for wireless because they are displeased when citizens make them do their job and they have to take into account what constituents have to say.”

He added:

“The wireless industry wants to get rid of bothersome public input or involvement in wireless facility siting matters, even for cell sites that would be on utility poles or light standards in the right of way adjoining people’s property or on private property next door.

“They want a process where people figure out what has happened only after it is too late to do anything.

“Folks will come home some evening and an ugly, toxic tower will be right next to their living room, bathroom and bedroom windows but the time to challenge the permit decision will have already passed.”

Fiber-optic networks a better option, many say

According to Fiber First L.A., fiber-optic networks are superior to wireless networks, in terms of cost and in providing high-speed internet — and they pose fewer potential health risks and fire risks.

According to a June 22 report by independent consulting firm CTC Technology & Energy, fiber-optic networks offer numerous advantages when compared with fixed-wireless technologies, including:

• Fixed-wireless technologies will continue to improve but will not match the performance of fiber-optic networks—primarily because the existing and potential bandwidth of fiber is thousands of times higher than wireless. Also, fixed-wireless networks have inherent capacity limitations that sharply limit the number of users on a network using a given amount of spectrum.
• Fixed-wireless network coverage is adversely affected by line-of-sight obstructions (including buildings and seasonal foliage) and weather. While a fiber network can physically connect every household in a service area (and deliver predictable performance), it is significantly more complex for a fixed-wireless network to deliver a line of sight to every household in a service area.
• Scalability is a critical challenge to fixed-wireless deployments, both technically and financially. A given amount of wireless spectrum is capable of supporting a given amount of network capacity. If the number of network users increases or users need more bandwidth, the network operator must increase the spectrum (which is both scarce and extremely expensive—and may not be possible), upgrade the technology, or add antennas. It is challenging to design a fixed wireless network that will provide sufficient, robust upstream and downstream capacity and reach all the addresses in unserved areas.
• The fastest fixed-wireless technologies (such as those that use millimeter-wave spectrum) are effective in delivering short-range service to closely grouped households in urban and suburban settings. These technologies are largely unsuitable for serving rural communities because of the typical geographic dispersion of addresses and the lack of mounting structures (such as towers or building rooftops).
• Fiber is sustainable, scalable, and renewable. It offers greater capacity, predictable performance, lower maintenance costs, and a longer technological lifetime than fixed-wireless technologies. Fiber service is not degraded by line-of-sight issues and is not affected by the capacity issues that constrain fixed wireless networks.

The report — commissioned by the Communications Workers of America — also pointed out that the U.S. government’s Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment Program’s notice of funding opportunity gives preference to fiber over fixed wireless.

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