The Aurora City Council on Tuesday night approved locating a 125-foot-high cellular tower in Lebanon Park on the city’s southeast side.
Aldermen voted 9-2 to give telecommunications company AT&T a conditional use permit for a 125-foot-high monopole that would replace an existing light pole on the baseball field in the park. The park is owned by the Fox Valley Park District, which has already approved the site for the pole.
Officials have said the cell tower would be similar to ones put in other Fox Valley Park District parks.
The city needed to give the park district and AT&T a conditional use because the monopole will be 125 feet high; if it had been 100 feet high, it would have been allowed without council action.
Andrew Flowers, of AT&T, said the company spent a lot of time and effort choosing the Lebanon Park site because its call data showed a lot of customers in the area experienced weak service, and many dropped calls.
“The community said we need this,” he said.
But some community members said the opposite.
Cynthia Rocha, who lives near Lebanon Park, said she provided aldermen with 150 pages of medical evidence that shows the problems radiation from cell antennas can cause.
Rocha said she has spent most of her days in and out of hospitals.
“My health is in jeopardy, my community’s health is in jeopardy,” she said. “Our health is not for sale, not for lease.”
Ald. John Laesch, at large, one of the votes against the pole, said it did not “seem to have community support.”
“For me, the public safety question hasn’t been addressed,” he said. “My hope is we could work with AT&T to find a different location.”
Much of the debate nationally around the health questions regarding cell towers – particularly the placement of 5G towers – has been on whether federal guidelines regarding the amount of radiation exposure is strict enough.
Flowers said AT&T works hard to meet the federal guidelines. But some say the guidelines, which were developed in 1996, have not been updated to keep up with 5G technology.
Some have said the FCC is tied too closely to the telecommunications industry, so its regulatory efforts are not stringent enough.
Ald. Carl Franco, 5th Ward, disagreed. saying the federal government “bends over backwards for safety” in its regulations.
“We can find stuff on the internet all day long,” he said. “But if we have to side with somebody, I side with the FCC and its regulations.”
The other vote against the pole location came from Ald. Edward Bugg, 9th Ward, who questioned why notices to nearby residents were not sent in Spanish. The neighborhood is largely Hispanic, and many people there only speak Spanish.
Ed Sieben, the city’s Planning and Zoning director, told aldermen the notices were not in Spanish because the Planning Department was not specifically directed to send notices in Spanish. He said the department would send notices in Spanish in the future.
But Bugg said the City Council Building, Zoning and Economic Development Committee had asked that all notices go out in Spanish.
Sieben said 140 properties – 130 of them homes, the others businesses – were sent notices because they were within 250 feet of the proposed tower. That is required by city ordinance. The notices prompted five phone calls for information, and three property owners showed up at the Planning and Zoning Commission public hearing on the issue.
“I thought all official notices would go out in both English and Spanish,” Bugg said. “My understanding was this would happen.”
Rocha said that was one of the reasons people in the neighborhood were skeptical that their interests were looked out for.
“They all feel a lack of representation from everyone who is sitting up here,” she said.
slord@tribpub.com
