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Faced with a lawsuit by Sprint Communications if the proposed new North Berkeley Sprint cellphone communications facility is not approved by the Berkeley City Council, the council blinked, took a step back, and gave itself another week to make its long-awaited decision on the controversial application. If the city council fails to take action next week, the Zoning Adjustment Board’s earlier approval of the project will automatically go into effect. 

Sprint wants to put a three-antennae booster facility on the roof of a commercial building on the Corner of Shattuck Avenue and Cedar Street in order to enhance its cellular service in the northern section of the city. A determined group of the proposed facility’s neighbors have been fighting the project, fearful that the antennae will cause harmful health effects. The city council has had the matter in its hands since April of last year, held a January 20th public hearing on the issue, and it appeared that they would be ready to vote on the matter at last Tuesday’s meeting. 

But on Feb. 5 the city council received a letter from Sprint’s Chicago-based lawyers pointedly noting that Sprint had proven its case for the facility, and City Attorney Manuela Albuquerque reported that her assistant met twice with Sprint representatives who indicated that they would sue the city if the application wasn’t granted. The council voted 5-2-1 (Hawley and Wozniak voting no, Shirek abstaining) to direct the city attorney’s office to bring back to the Feb. 17 city council meeting two alternative resolutions, one upholding and the other overturning ZAB’s approval decision. 

If the council seemed uncertain in the face of Sprint’s lawsuit threat, the council’s action later in the meeting concerning the LeConte traffic circle issue confused several observers. 

Last year, the city council approved five traffic-calming circles for the LeConte neighborhood, but that was before the city’s budget crisis hit. Councilmember Linda Maio introduced an item requesting that while keeping the city’s commitment to eventually build the five LeConte circles, there would be no action for two weeks while transportation department staff and the Transportation Commission investigated possible lower-cost traffic circle designs. But several councilmembers balked at the suggestion, particularly Maudelle Shirek, who represents part of the LeConte neighborhood. The city council then passed Councilmember Miriam Hawley’s motion to keep the city’s commitment to build the five LeConte circles, but to build them in the “most cost effective manner possible” and to have the city manager return in two weeks with a report on the availability of high-quality but lower-cost traffic circle designs (5-2, Shirek and Wozniak abstaining; Bates recusing himself). Unless traffic circles in LeConte are to be built within the next two weeks, it was unclear how the Hawley substitute motion differed from the original Maio motion. After the meeting, Maio expressed the hope that the city manager’s office could return in two weeks with a traffic circle design that could satisfy all sides. 

Councilmember Margaret Breland, who has been ill for several weeks, participated in the meeting by telephone.