Residents of the Tibbets Station neighborhood in Sammamish may have lost an appeal to prevent T-Mobile from building a 120 foot cell tower next to their homes, but their message is being heard at city hall.

That message is – the business goals of cell phone companies like T-Mobile and Clearwire should not automatically trump the desire of locals to preserve the character of their neighborhoods and the natural setting that is a feature of the Plateau.

With the Sammamish City Council scheduled to adopt new Wireless Communications Facilities (WCF) standards in the next few weeks, an ad hoc committee has formed to explore what the city can do to better regulate what such towers can look like and where they can go.

The Tibbets Station case was not the first of city residents objecting to what they claim are eyesores that compromise the aesthetics of the area and reduce property values. It was the large cell tower that Clearwire built in the Trossachs neighborhood three years ago, to the objections of homeowners there, that first brought to the attention of councilors the importance of codifying guidelines for WCF that encourage aesthetic sensitivity for the residents as much as they maximize cell phone coverage and cost effectiveness for phone companies.

Councilors Mark Cross and John Curley will this week meet with experts in the field of Federal wireless communications standards to discuss the legal obligation of cities to allow cell phone providers to build what they need to provide adequate coverage.

Cross told The Reporter the case of the T-Mobile tower at Tibbets Station was one of the things that prompted him to have a closer look at WCF options before the council signed anything into the Sammamish Municipal Code.

“(T-Mobile) were able to come in with a 120 foot pole, in what in my opinion is a bad location, and still get it approved,” Cross said, suggesting the decision of Hearing Examiner John Galt to allow such a large tower within 90 feet of a residence could form a precedent for future facilities in or adjacent to residential neighborhoods.

Cross, whose day job is with the City of Bellevue Planning Department, said he was particularly concerned with three issues: how tall WCF could be, how well they blended into their surroundings, and the attachment of external cables, wires and equipment boxes.

“What I want is to have (wireless facilities) that are compatible to residential neighborhoods,” he said.

Cross said the cities of Issaquah, Redmond, Bellevue and Bothell all had much tighter height restrictions than were enforced in Sammamish, typically limiting new structures in residential areas to no more than 20 feet above existing telephone poles.

In Redmond, that allowance is capped at 60 feet. The T-Mobile tower approved by Galt for Tibbets Station will be 80 feet higher than the 40 foot pole it will replace.

“The issues they were talking about (in the Tibbets Station case) are the same ones I am interested in here,” Cross said.

He is also concerned about the growing trend of attaching the cell tower’s equipment box to the outside of the pole, to avoid having to lease more land around the base in which to bury a storage box.

“We don’t want to have a big, gray utility box, and reams of two inch cable running up the side of these things,” Cross said. “They can begin to look like military installations.”

He added Sammamish appeared to be struggling with an area of its development that other cities had managed to appropriately regulate.

“It seems like we never really got our hands around what we needed to do to encourage neighborhood and residential-friendly antennae,” he said. “The purpose of this committee is to have a look at how we can follow the same tough regulations that other cities are following. I drive through other cities, and I don’t see these great big things. But I see them here.”

Councilmember Curley said the topography of Sammamish presented unique challenges.

“Our landscape is a little different from other cities, in that we have these steep hills and large trees that have a bearing on where these poles can go to get good coverage,” he said. “This is something that is going to affect more and more people as time goes on.”

Curley said the problem with the current code had a lot to do with the vague language that set guidelines for cell phone providers.

“There are two words in there that are the problem: one is ‘reasonable,’ and the other is ‘aesthetic.’ What’s reasonable to one person is not necessarily reasonable to another.”

He said that phone companies were very conscious of the cost of providing coverage, and that camouflaging towers as faux-trees or using less visually obtrusive equipment could multiply by four the cost of each tower. Curley said the city needed to be careful in what it required of cell phone companies.

“If you throw up too many barriers in the way of these guys, then they’ll go to the feds,” he said, referring to the Federal Telecommunications Commission which oversees the industry and the regulation of WCF. “Then the feds come in, and that opens up a Pandora’s box that could cost the city a whole lot of money. And we don’t want that.”

While agreeing that towers like the one at Tibbets Station would have a negative impact on home values, Curley suggested that cell towers were perhaps a necessary evil.

“It’s life in the modern world,” he said. “We’ve got to have them. It’s kind of like the people that want to eat the cake but don’t want to gain the weight. If you want good cell reception, you’ve got to have the towers.”