Jeffco representatives may feel the same way: Earlier this month, county commissioners backed a planning-department idea to modify the Telecommunications Land Use Plan, which came on line in 1985 and was last tweaked in 1994. Nick Morgan, the Jeffco planner who presented the proposition to the commissioners, won't come right out and say that the seemingly endless tower battles are among the biggest reasons why the county is taking this step. But, he concedes, "we recognize there is a need for a comprehensive reexamination of the effectiveness of the governing plan."
Still, changes in this area are apt to be contentious, too. The review will move forward in three phases, and Morgan assumed that the first two -- concerning so-called housekeeping matters and wireless ser-vices, respectively -- would raise relatively few hackles. (Everyone's expecting fireworks during phase three, in which towers will be the main topic.) But CARE's Carney is already concerned about possible regulation alterations for cell-phone towers, which put off the same type of RF as their larger broadcasting cousins. "The telecommunications revisions the county is proposing in phase two call for allowing cell towers anywhere they can be hidden -- homes, schools, churches, public gathering areas," Carney says. "That would mean a person who's concerned about this couldn't go anywhere without a chance of having an antenna close by."
John Johnston
Gordon Hamilton lives near the Lookout Mountain antenna farm.
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Jeffco's Morgan counters that the cell-tower issue came up in a series of generic queries that were inspired by trends in other parts of the country and shouldn't be interpreted as a new policy initiative. "We expect to get a lot of feedback and input from people that will help determine what the plan will look like," he says.
Despite the death of his wife, Gordon Hamilton may not be one of those weighing in; he's been too busy coming to grips with his loss to get deeply involved in the RF fight. Part of him would like to move off Lookout Mountain, but various circumstances he chooses not to mention make that impossible. So he's concentrated on making his house as safe as possible, installing steel siding that may offer a modicum of protection and putting "radiation block" on all his windows. But each time he coughs or gets a sore throat, he worries that something invisible and insidious is slowly killing him.
"Whether there's a connection with what happened to Nancy, I can't say," Gordon admits. "But it might have been a catalyst her body needed to set off the whole chain of events. I pray it wasn't, but I don't know. I just don't know."
FCC ahoy: "The Making of a Pirate," which appeared in this space on October 4, told the tale of Monk, a thirty-something dude from Boulder who was so fed up with the sorry state of commercial radio that he decided to start a low-power FM station of his own. When his efforts to legally obtain a license were foiled, he went on the air anyhow, providing Boulderites with a welcome alternative until last July, when two Federal Communications Commission representatives ordered that the plug be pulled. Monk complied, but instead of mothballing his equipment, he gave it to Boulder Underground Radio Group (BURG), a band of kindred spirits who sneakily broadcast programming for what they dubbed "Free Boulder Radio" from the back of a van.
All that came to an end on January 18, when the FCC did to BURG what it had done to Monk. According to a BURG spokesman who communicates by e-mail, the group parked its van on the property of a local who "thought we were a HAM setup. So he had plausible denial."
On the day the music died, Jon Sprague, an FCC agent, traced the Free Boulder Radio signal: He told the host that he didn't have a partner with him because "we're working the Olympics and are shorthanded."
"The host let him look at everything," the BURG spokesman explains. "We had the transmitter outside in a locked van hooked to an antenna in a tree and power from the building. The host didn't have a key; we leased the space from him. The studio was inside, and we used a 2.4 GHz wireless link to hook into the transmitter, so nothing illegal was actually on his property other than the locked van."
Sprague gave the BURG host a letter warning that "operation of radio transmitting equipment without a valid radio-station authorization" could subject the owner of the operation to penalties "including, but not limited to, a maximum criminal fine of $100,000 and/or one year imprisonment, or arrest of the equipment for the first offense." The gear wasn't seized, though, and the BURG spokesman promises the station will return: "We'll be back after a cooling-down period and finding a new location."
Oh, yeah: The slogan of Free Boulder Radio is "Radio So Good It's Illegal."
