Gospel Church on Figueroa Wants to Install Cell Tower

A zoning hearing regarding Highland Park Full Gospel Assembly Church's request to install a Metro PCS wireless telecommunications facility on their rooftop will be held on Wednesday, May 1 at Los Angeles City Hall.

According to the city's planning department, the Metro PCS is proposing to install a "wireless telecommunications facility with six new panel antennas within screen boxes on an existing church cupola on a tower element and equipment on ground level."

Highland Park Full Gospel Assembly Church is located at 7131 North Figueroa Street, at the border of Eagle Rock and Highland Park and squarely within the RD1.5-1 zone.

Los Angeles' zoning laws do not technically allow cell towers to be built residential areas, which is why Metro PCS is required to receive both a zoning permit and undergo an environmental review.

Already one neighbor, Joel Frodding, has submitted a letter to both the Historic Highland Park and Eagle Rock Neighborhood Councils expressing opposition to the church's request for a permit.

In the letter, Frodding said that the proposed facility would be not only unsightly, but potentially unhealthy.

"I am very opposed to these additions in my neighborhood. The Figueroa corridor is already extremely commercial and in some spots unsightly. This proposed project will not only be visible by everyone who lives on the hillsides facing the church, but from the street level as well," Frodding wrote. "Also, the addition of these towers brings focused electromagnetic waves to within 500 feet of homes and businesses. Do we know the health effects of these waves?"

Veronica Arvizu, a representative for Metro PCS, did not return Patch's call for comment.

The expansion of cell phone towers into residential areas has become a growing concern.

According to the Los Angeles Times, cell phone companies have been especially eager to sign leases with churches, in order to take advantage of their high steeples to fill wireless dead zones and meet the growing need for cell service spurred by the proliferation of smart phones and tablets.

The impacts of microwave frequencies emitted by cell towers are still up for debate.

From the Los Angeles Times:

The cellphone trade group CTIA says that emissions from the industry's towers are "thousands of times less than the FCC's limits for safe exposure," and it cites reports from the Federal Communications Commission asserting that no evidence links cancer to wireless devices or, according to the National Cancer Institute, to radio-frequency energy.

But in 2011, the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified radio-frequency electromagnetic fields as possibly carcinogenic to humans, bolstering fears raised by tower opponents.