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Dear Mayor Bates and Council, 

We have been disappointed to learn that yet another neighborhood has become completely disillusioned with city staff and Berkeley politics around this senseless drive to install more transmitting antennas in residential neighborhoods. Virtually the same thing happened to our neighborhood when we fought Nextel’s attempts to install an array of twelve 500 watt antennae on the Oaks Theater.  

We were told many times by city staff and our own Councilmembers that neither we nor Nextel could lobby them in any way while the appeal was pending, in order not to prejudice them. Then, at the hearing, one of Nextel’s lawyers grandly thanked the Council for meetings he had had with them in the previous weeks. We were amazed to learn that Councilmembers had been secretly meeting with Nextel staff at the same time they were instructing us that they would not even talk to us, the citizens of Berkeley. We subsequently learned that Nextel had also hired another attorney who lives in the Berkeley hills (and has long been active in the old BCA politics and current campaigns) to lobby the mayor and council.  

We learned that Nextel had very cleverly used their corporate lawyer to lobby the more moderate members of the council, and at the same time used this local “BCA” lawyer to lobby the more radical members of the council! All this at the same time that Berkeley citizens were instructed not to even talk to anyone on the Council! You can imagine how disgusted our neighborhood group was when we learned this. 

We also experienced the inexplicable bias that city’s planning staff and attorneys have against Berkeley’s citizens. Staff would not accept a single issue that we raised as valid, while supporting and endorsing everything that Nextel’s hired guns presented. Only the testimony of Nextel’s hired “experts” was accepted as valid, even though we discredited many of them. We all worked on our own time for the good of our community while Nextel’s representatives said only what they were paid to say. We found that our written objections were basically emailed to Nextel, and Nextel’s replies were cut and pasted into the city’s documents as though they were responses done by city staff. (After this happened several times, we suggested that the city should bill city staff time on the dispute to Nextel, since our own city employees were essentially acting as employees of Nextel.) 

The mayor and Council can be sure that even more of their neighbors and constituents will develop a sense of betrayal towards the city’s politicians, and contempt towards city staff, unless things change. We for example were actually very moderate and supportive of our city staff and politicians until we had the temerity to question their blind support of Nextel. The whole process was quite an education for us and for our neighbors.  

It’s even more ridiculous that the Council and city staff alienate whole neighborhoods over the issue of antenna placement. As we have established many times, based on testimony from telecom companies’ own engineers, these transmitting arrays can be installed in the industrial section of the city or on highrises downtown, and can provide essentially the same service from those locations. After Nextel was denied the Oaks Theater, they simply built their array on a commercial building along San Pablo Ave in Albany, apart from any residential neighborhoods. This site provided them the same coverage to the Berkeley hills as the proposed array on the Oaks. Sprint can do the same, and find an acceptable site that is not in the middle of a residential neighborhood. 

Finally, we cannot resist noting that the increased capacity that these companies seek is not for basic cell phone use. It’s to provide capacity so that cell phones can be used for web surfing, video streaming, music, gaming, and all the other relatively useless junk the companies are trying to market now.  

Why city staff and our own City Council would side with this industry against the citizens of Berkeley remains a mystery to us.  

Connie and Kevin Sutton are Berkeley residents.