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Cell Towers A Tough Sell At Hillsborough Schools

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By RICHARD MULLINS | The Tampa Tribune

Published: February 17, 2009

TAMPA - On a recent sunny afternoon, a dozen youngsters played in a circle with a rainbow-colored parachute in the playground outside Witter Elementary School in Tampa. A few yards away stood a new 200-foot-tall cell phone tower.

The school allowed the tower to go up, generating thousands of dollars a month by renting space on it to some of the nation's largest cell phone companies.

Across Hillsborough County, school principals are lining up to put similar towers on their campuses to produce badly needed cash for teacher salaries and classroom supplies, even shoes for children who lack them. By summer, 14 new towers could be up at local schools.

Some school officials are ready to jump at the new revenue, but they might be jumping into a hornets' nest.

On one side are cellular companies that have customers with new iPhones, BlackBerrys and other smart phones who demand always-on everywhere coverage for e-mail, text messages and Internet access. On the other side are vocal and well-organized parent groups warning about health risks of wireless signals.

One thing is clear in the debate. Cellular companies have money to offer — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars a month.

"This is a great opportunity for schools," said Stacy Frank, founder of Tampa-based tower company Collier II, which in June 2006 won the exclusive right to build cell phone towers on Hillsborough County school properties.

"Where else are they going to find money like this? It's not a panacea, but when schools are going broke, can they afford to say no?"

Meanwhile, demand for smart phones is only going up.

More than 15 percent of U.S. households have dropped their home land-line phones in favor of a cellular-only lifestyle. More parents are buying cell phones for their children for safety reasons, sometimes for children as young as 6.

Americans have an estimated 272 million cell phones, almost one for every citizen, according to industry data.

Providing coverage for all those new devices takes new antennas. Last year, 103 towers went up within a 40-mile radius of downtown Tampa, according to the wireless firm AntennaSearch. That area has about 4,500 antennas.

AT&T has plans for 18 new cellular sites in that area.

In some cases, new towers can be attached to tall buildings, disguised as palm trees or even as tall crosses. One disguised as a flagpole stands at Dale Mabry Highway and Kennedy Boulevard.

Given that most cellular towers have a range of a few miles, there's a scarcity of sites for towers. Unless tower companies find more sites, it's possible only 25 will go up this year in the Tampa zone, according to AntennaSearch.

Schools have emerged as attractive spots for new towers. They tend to have open space to situate a tower and almost always are in residential areas where it's especially difficult to site a tower. Schools also enjoy an inside track when it comes to navigating local government bureaucracies.

Jumping in to supply this demand is Frank.

Frank markets her company as specializing in placing towers at Hillsborough schools and advertises nearly every school as available. Under her contract with the schools, everyone receives some revenue from a new tower.

Her company builds, owns, maintains and markets towers to wireless companies such as AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Her company receives half the rent, 40 percent goes to the school and 10 percent goes to the school district.

A school can receive $9,000 per year from each carrier on a tower, Frank said, with that amount growing 3 percent to 4 percent a year. With five or more potential carriers, a school could receive $45,000 or more annually, with no capital outlay from the school.

The school board allows each principal to decide whether a tower is right for a school. Fourteen Hillsborough County schools have said yes. Altogether, those schools could collect nearly $232,000 this year.

Some parents say that provides pennies per student per day and that it's not worth the tension that has surfaced.

Ray Alzamora, whose child attends Cimino Elementary School, which has a lease pending for a cell tower, said the school's actions were sneaky. Frank joined the principal at a community meeting in January, but Alzamora said the decision to erect a tower largely had been made.

Like many parents, he is concerned about the children's health and the effect of the towers on property values. The state-of-the-art projectors and covered basketball court the school plans to buy with money might be nice, he said, "but it's not worth the hit the neighbors are taking."

Parents opposing towers tend to point to health risks.

No studies have focused on cellular towers — or even on radio waves — and their effect on humans. Several studies have looked at the effect of radio waves and microwaves combined; these generally have not shown any increase in cancer, except for an Air Force study that suggests an increase in brain tumors in association with radio frequency-microwave exposure.

In 2008, the National Academies noted a lack of research "measuring the amount of RF energy received by juveniles, children, pregnant women, and fetuses from wireless devices and RF base station antennas."

It is not known whether children are more susceptible to radio frequency radiation, but "they may be at increased risk because of their developing organ and tissue systems."

Frank says parents are worrying about "voodoo science." "There are no health risks from these towers. … These are low-wattage pieces of equipment."

They're the same towers that federal regulators allow anywhere else, but the division over their placement at schools is forcing principals to consider whether the extra cash is worth the trouble.

"I know the principals want it," said Marie Valenti, principal of Chiaramonte Elementary School in Tampa, which draws $2,575 monthly from its cell tower lease. "But if their parents are going to be upset, it's definitely going to have an impact on their decisions."

Researcher Michael Messano and reporter Adam Emerson contributed to this report. Reporter Richard Mullins can be reached at (813) 259-7919.

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