Subject: (Lundquist) Congressional action is needed! (fwd)
Date: Thu, 4 Mar 1999 115303 -0600 (CST)
From: "Roy L. Beavers" <rbeavers@llion.org>
To: emfguru <rbeavers@llion.org>
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Hi everybody:
.........I see an awful lot of "CYA" in the following message......
Let me teach everybody another acronym (from my U.S. Navy days):
Situation (is) Normal -- All F____d Up!!!.....SNAFU.............
That seems to fit even better......
But we don't have to settle for a SNAFU government or bureaucracy,
do we???? Send this to your Congressman!!! And ask for a Congressional
"Oversight" hearing on the FCC to ascertain how well they are (not)
doing their job.......
Cheerio.....
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
rbeavers@llion.org................
...It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness...
.................PEOPLE ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN PROFITS...............
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 4 Mar 99 10:19:14 MST
From: MARJORIE LUNDQUIST
To: thistle@sover.net
Cc: rbeavers@llion.org
Subject: Congressional action is needed!
I have recently been working with officials of Sauk County, Wisconsin, which
is struggling to write a county ordinance to regulate radio freqeuncy (RF)
transmitters and towers. I'd like to briefly share with you some of the
issues that have come up.
(1) A decision was made by the County Commissioners that the ordinance would
apply to ALL RF transmitters (so it will apply to commercial radio and TV
transmitters, as well as wireless telecommunications transmitters). [I
publicly applauded this decision.] But then a split developed on the issue of
whether the ordinance should regulate the transmitters themselves, or just the
towers that support them. [My position is that, ideally, BOTH should be
regulated.]
(2) The original draft of the ordinance did not provide for monitoring of the
transmitters to ascertain compliance with FCC regulations. This is an
important point because no federal government agency will do this monitoring.
This means that transmitters will simply NOT be monitored for compliance with
FCC regulations, unless the ordinance specifies who should do this, and how
often (or unless some private party is prepared to pay the costs of FCC
complaince monitoring out of his/its own pocket, which seems unlikely).
And then the question arose of who should pay for any monitoring required
under the ordinance. The county didn't want to pay for it. But there was a
fellow at the meeting who owned a transmitter and tower, and he did not want
any ordinance passed that would increase his costs.
What the public would like, I think, is for the FCC to do its own compliance
monitoring of transmitters. At present it does NOT do this (except under very
unusual situations); instead, it is the responsbility of the party alleging
non-compliance with FCC standards to prove its allegations before the FCC. In
this way the FCC has put the resonsibility for compliance monitoring on the
interested parties, while it acts in an adjudicatory role. This is quite
different from the way a public health agency behaves (they respond to
complaints by taking measurements to evaluate conditions).
This issue has not yet been settled. Because it is a difficult issue with no
good solution, there is a strong tendency to simply get rid of it (by having
the ordinance be silent on the issue of FCC compliance monitoring, or by
regulating only towers, but not the transmitters situated on them).
These are the two major issues that have arisen to date in Sauk County.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>From my perspective as a health professional, the biggest problem is that the
FCC is the ONLY federal agency that currently actively regulates RF and
microwave sources, but it does NOT do this the way a public health agency
would, and this tends to leave the public angry and frustrated when a health
problem arises that is attributed to one of these transmitters. A member of
the public typically will complain to the FCC, expecting a public health type
of response, where the agency sends someone out to investigate the complaint,
and make measurements, and then issue a report. But the FCC does not do this;
it expects the complainer to carry out the investigation (paying all the
costs) and then bring a legal case to the FCC for a judgment. Since most
complainers are not financially able to do this, what ACTUALLY happens is that
FCC regulations often are NOT complied with, and nobody has any proof of this
noncompliance!........[THAT is just about the whole story of the LOOKOUT
MOUNTAIN disaster......guru......]
One way to address this problem is for the FCC to change its way of operating.
This is unlikely to happen unless Congress mandates it.
There is another way to handle it: provide funding to the EPA to respond to
citizen complains, and require the FCC to forward to the EPA all complaints of
a health nature allegedly resulting from RF/MW exposure to a transmitter that
it receives. Again, Congress would have to take action to bring this about.
[I favor this last course of action, since the EPA is concerned with health
effects and the adequacy of environmental health standards, while the FCC is
not.] -- Marjorie Lundquist
P.S. Here is an interesting question. The Telecommunications Act of 1996
made the FCC the sole federal agency that sets standards for wireless
telecommunications transmitters for the entire USA. Suppose the EPA
determined that the FCC standards for these transmitters did NOT protect the
public health; would the EPA be in violation of the Telecommuncations Act of
1996, if it set a standard for such transmitters that was more stringent than
the standard adopted by the FCC?
*********************************
Marjorie Lundquist, Ph.D., C.I.H.
Bioelectromagnetic Hygienist
P. O. Box 11831
Milwaukee, WI 53211-0831 USA
*********************************
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.feb.se/EMF-L/EMF-L.html