Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Editorials

Users love the phones, but they hate the poles

Considering the number of people who drive cars or stroll along the streets of Los Gatos with cellular phones hugged to their ears, one wouldn't think there would be so much hostility toward monopoles.

After all, without the antennas that beam the signals, those people who turn local restaurants into offices and enter and exit busy freeways paying more attention to their telephone conversations than to the automobiles zooming by would be out of business.

They might have to leave their work at the office when they go out to lunch, much as everyone loves the atmosphere it creates when someone at the next table is carrying on a telephone conversation.

Although no one wants to give up their car phones and their handy little cellular phones, everyone has a reason to protest the placing of monopoles in their back yards.

Several years ago, parents at Fisher Middle School fought a long, hard battle to keep a monopole from being placed on the school grounds. Their concern was the unknown health risks of long-term exposure to the poles.

These days, the battle seems to be over aesthetics. No one wants to look at a pole towering over the landscape.

Still, cellular phone companies responding to ever-increasing demand are looking everywhere for places to plant their poles. If the space between poles is too great, service is interrupted.

In Los Gatos, the concern for aesthetics overrode the march of progress--at least temporarily--when the Town Council sent Pacific Bell Mobile Services back to the Planning Commission to make the company's proposed 45-foot pole at 400 More Ave. less obtrusive.

The company proposed camouflaging the pole to look like a tree and planting it in a grove of trees. What's more, the company offered to plant five additional 25-foot trees at the base of the pole.

Councilmembers, however, pointed out that to ensure good reception, the pole would still have to stick up at least six feet above the tree tops. Whether one would have to be in a helicopter to notice the disparity in heights was not mentioned.

The council sent the phone company back to the commission to work on ways to better hide the pole even after Pacific Bell Mobile Services revealed that it had, in fact, erected a green dummy pole--which had gone unnoticed by neighbors and by councilmembers who went to view the site prior to the meeting.

As silly as the battles sometimes get, it's important that aesthetics not be given short shrift. In many neighborhoods, underground utilities and cable television have made a vast improvement in how neighborhoods look. It would be a mistake not to demand of cellular phone companies that they pay strict attention to the aesthetics of progress as well as the efficiency.

Happy Holidays

The staff of the Los Gatos Weekly-Times wishes you a very happy holiday season. Throughout the past year, it has been our pleasure to be a part of this delightful community and to keep you informed of local issues. We appreciate your support, whether in calling us with news tips, writing lively letters to our Op/Ed pages or advertising your business in your hometown newspaper.