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Cell tower foes call for change
Canada Created: 20 Apr 2008
Residents who want cellphone providers to listen to the public before putting up communications towers made their voices heard Thursday in Richmond Hill.

A group of between 300 to 350 people showed up to protest the building of a Bell cell tower at the corner of Elgin Mills Road and Bathurst Street.

The tower is already built, complete with a Canadian flag atop, but it has struck a nerve with local residents, who say they weren’t given proper notification before it was approved.

The demonstration, organized by the group PACT, Precautionary Approach to Cell Towers, was a protest against the lack of consultation with nearby residents.

Members of the group, as well as other residents, inundated Bell with letters in an effort to stop the tower’s construction. It is just one of several the group plans to protest if future towers are proposed too close to schools and homes.

“We want council to know that this is a broad issue and not just an issue on one corner,” Rhonda Pomerantz-Kula, a member of PACT said.

While residents are up in arms over the tower, Jason Laszlo spokesperson for Bell Canada, said all the regulations were followed when putting up the tower.

“We’ve built thousands of these sites across Canada and we’ve followed every letter of every regulation to a T,” Mr. Laszlo said.

Residents and business owners within 120 metres of the property line of the tower were notified of an information session last spring, Mr. Laszlo added.

“These towers are very expensive to build and maintain. We don’t build them unless we know they will be the facilitator of several thousand calls,” Mr. Laszlo said.

While council approved the Bell tower in April 2007, the Rogers proposal has yet to be decided.

Carrying placards with slogans reading, “Bell Move Your Cell Tower” and “Bell What About our Democratic rights?” and “No cell towers near our kids,” the group was targeting Thursday’s rush hour traffic as an audience.

“It was successful. We said if we could get 300 people out it would be successful and we did,” Ms Pomerantz-Kula said. “It was cool. We got a lot of support through horn-honking by the cars driving by.”

The primary concern the group has is the possible health risks associated with electromagnetic fields. The companies have said the EMFs given off by the towers are within government guidelines, although some critics say these guidelines are out of date.

Part of the problem with the Elgin Mills and Bathurst tower, they said, is that a Rogers tower is proposed for the same intersection, close to a nursery school.

The town gets a chance to offer comment on that tower plan at a May 12 meeting.

Given the contentious nature of that meeting, Ms Pomerantz-Kula is hoping council changes the location to accommodate the hundreds of people she anticipates.

At a meeting at the Elgin West Community Centre last November, hundreds of people attended. Whether or not council chooses to approve the proposal or not, the final decision rests with Industry Canada.

The residents group is hoping changes will be made to the standards Industry Canada uses when determining where to put cellphone towers.

Richmond Hill isn’t the only municipality facing problems over cell towers in unpopular locations.

Vaughan and Toronto have also seen protests over proposals for various towers.
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Source: Liberal - Richmond Hill, Caroline Grech, 19 Apr 2008

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