Subject: Cobb Co., GA cell tower issue (Statham)..
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 160355 -0600 (CST)
From: "Roy L. Beavers"
To: emfguru
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........This is one is a good laugh..... And, it should give a lot
of people some ideas....... The school board, however, appears to be
oblivious of the real issue -- EMF......
Roy Beavers (EMFguru)
rbeavers@llion.org
.....It is better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness.....
NEW!!! Website
...................People are more important than profits.................
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 4 Nov 1999 16:27:54 -0500
From: Linda Statham
To: Roy Beavers
Subject: Cobb Co., GA cell tower issue
Roy,
This article was in the 11-3-99 Atlanta Journal.
Cobb, cell phone firm escalate towering war
BellSouth Mobility sues over fence-out
by Diane R. Stepp, staff writer
Cobb County school officials have locked up two cell phone towers
belonging to BellSouth Mobility, in a schoolyard fight that escalated
Tues. into a lawsuit.
Miffed over BellSouth's refusal to remove a cellular telephone tower
from an elem. school campus, the school system retaliated by erecting
8-foot-tall fences around two other BellSouth towers on school property.
Then it slapped padlocks on them.
A suit filed in Cobb Co. Superior Ct. by BS demands that school
officials tear down the fences.
The communications company discovered the lockout in Sept., when one
of its maintenance crews responded to an emergency alarm at its tower at
a school bus maintenance facility on Mars Hill Road. The crew couldn't get in.
The next day, BS discovered that Cobb school officials also were
holding the key to a gated fence surrounding another tower on th campus
of South Cobb HS.
Since then, BS has been forced to call the deputy superintendent to
ask permission to access its two towers.
"They've called me four times, and three times I've said no since it
was not for repairs on 911 service," said Dept. Supt. James Wilson.
The dispute flard up after school and company officials failed to
reach an agreement to remove a 193 foot tall tower from Tritt Elem.
School. The tower has been a lightning rod for protest from parents and neighbors since last spring, when it was erected 30 ft. from a school building. The school system was to get $75,000 for leasing the property.
School administrators asked BS to move the tower to a nearby
commercial site.
But BS has set the price to move it at $400,000 which school
officials say is exorbitant.
Glen Estell, vice pres. of BS Mobility, said the figure represents
only about one-third of the $1.25 million cost of erecting and moving the custom-designed tower, which is embedded in 60 ft. of concrete.
The school system now says that three five-year lease contracts with
BS - for towers at Tritt, South Cobb High and the bus facility - are
invalid because they were never voted on by the school board. The
contracts were signed by then-school board chairman Gordon O'Neill.
Estell said Tues. that the contracts are legal since O'Neill had the
authority to execute the lease. Estell said the district's law firm
drafted the leases.
Atty. Richard Calhoun, who is representing the Cobb School system,
said the failure of the board to vote on the contract "was a mistake."
However, he said that the board has officially voted on only one of more
than a dozen similar agreements with communications companies.
On Thurs., Johnson is scheduled to meet with Tritt parents at 7 pm to
give them an update on efforts to remove the tower.
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Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com