Cell Phone Towers in Public Parks?

The Los Angeles Department of Recreation and Parks is considering the installation of cellular phone towers in some of the city’s public parks, and although the department says it has not set any policy on the issue, a high-ranking manager is opposed to any community representation in the project’s so-called “working sessions.”

That was the gist of comments inspired by a report presented to the Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners at its twice-monthly meeting, held at the Glassell Park Recreation Center Wednesday, June 15.

The report (No. 11-185), among a dozen items on the meeting’s agenda, was titled “Park Property—Installation of Cellular Telecommunication Equipment.”

Presented by Melinda Gejer, a Rec and Parks city planning associate, the report began with a reference to the commissioners’ May 4 meeting, during which “some specific instructions [were] given by the commission in terms of revising the procedures, guidelines and leases to reflect the desires of this department,” Gejer said.  

The official requested the board to adopt the various procedures and guidelines as well as site-lease agreements whose prices would be based on geographical locations, “reflecting the concept that some areas of the city are more desirable than others for our applicants.”

Although site leases for the proposed cellular towers provide “some flexibility for this department, in terms of procedure it’s important to remember that every application will come before this commission for conceptual approval,” Gejer said. “If conceptual approval is granted, then we can enter into an extensive and exhaustive community outreach process—and the final approval, reflecting those comments, will be brought back before this commission.”

Every application, Gejer concluded, will be “reviewed twice by this commission and will have full staff review as well.”

Glenn Bailey, chairman of the Los Angeles City Bicycle Advisory Commission and a founding member of the Encino Neighborhood Council, urged the board to consult with the city’s neighborhood councils on any steps to allow cellular towers in public parks within a given council’s jurisdiction.

Bailey also asked the board to provide a minimum of 60 days notice to neighborhood councils so that relevant committees within the councils get enough time to study and decide on the cellular tower proposals before the department.

“We are quite concerned about the general, multiple use of our parks and rec areas and we are also concerned regarding the process,” Clyde Williams, a member of the L.A. 32 Neighborhood Council, which encompasses El Sereno, and the Northeast Los Angeles Coalition, told the board.

All proposals for cell towers in the L.A. 32 Neighborhood Council’s jurisdiction go through the council’s land use committee, which makes recommendations, Williams said. “Why not [in the case of] the parks?”

A lot of people in El Sereno “are quite sensitive to cellular phone towers, where they going to be located—and also whether they may or may not influence the public health and visual aspects [of the issue],” Williams said, adding that “we’ve gone around and around with AT&T and others in El Sereno regarding cell towers and how to mount them.”

Finally, said Williams, “we are part of the City of Los Angeles—why aren’t the departments of neighborhood empowerment talking to Rec and Parks?”

The idea of building cellular phone towers in public parks continues the Board’s “headlong slide of commercialization of our city parks,” said Joseph Young, a community activist with the Sierra Club and the Friends of Griffith Park. “You want to wring every penny you can out of our parks. It is wrong. We are destroying the very things that make parks what they are intended to be—places of serenity, tranquility and beauty.”

An AT&T representative, Donovan Green, thanked the board for allowing the process of cellular towers in parks to come as far as it has, but requested another working session to work out some of AT&Ts additional concerns. Among them was the telecommunications giant’s desire to increase the minimum lease for erecting cellular towers in public parks from five years to 10 years “to give us a better opportunity to recoup our investment,” Green said.

He said AT&T was concerned about the “time it would take to complete some of the guidelines and procedures, along with the normal city permit processes” as well as the time frames for arranging and conducting public hearings and meetings with different community groups.”

W. Jerome Stanley, a member of the Board of Recreation and Park Commissioners, raised the pertinent issue of whether it is possible for any members of the community or Neighborhood Councils to participate in the working sessions.

“It seems like there are competing interests in something like this,” he said to several Rec and Parks managers in attendance. “Eventually, the challenges will be coming back to the board anyway, and if some of those things can be flushed out in a working session it might make our path smoother going forward. Any thoughts?”

Mike Shull, the department’s superintendent for the Planning, Construction and Maintenance division, said that while he agreed with Stanley’s assessment, “having a meeting like that would just be discussions mainly about whether to do this [allow cellular towers] at all or not. And I don’t know that’s what we’re trying to do. I think we’d like to do it because we think some parks would embrace it and others may not.”

But if the department does have a working session meeting in which only the proponents of cellular towers are invited, “then you’re basically excluding those who are against doing it,” Stanley said. The result of such approach, the board member added, is that “we start out advocating without the input of those who are against it—and why—and what conditions they might consider to make it work.”

For parks managers and supervisors to address community concerns “before we have a chance to flush them out or our City Council has a chance to flush them out might be preemptively beneficial,” Stanley said.

“At the risk of sounding like I’m disagreeing with you … if we did that I honestly believe that you’d never see a policy,” Shull replied.