Fighting city hall: Corporation 1, citizens 0

UU World: The Magazine of the Unitarian Universalist Association, May/Jun 2003 by Wolman, David, Wax, Heather

"When communities say no to the corporations and their towers...the corporations do sue," prodemocracy activist Richard Grossman writes in his 1999 essay Want to Violate a Corporation's Civil Rights? Just Say No to Its Cell Phone Tower. "Citing the authority of the 1996 act, which the telecommunications corporations wrote, they instruct federal judges to order city councils, county legislatures, New England-style town meetings-wherever democracy rears its head-to get out of the way."

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Lynn Hiller is talking about "come-heres" and "washashores," over a lunch of fresh salmon and tuna sandwiches in Wellfleet. In a gentle voice, the 75-year-old retiree explains how these terms describe two populations of nonnatives: Come-heres are summer tourists; washashores are people who've retired to the Cape. Omnipoint followed the come-heres, to improve service for people who spend some time relaxing on the Cape yet can't leave their cell phones behind. Thoreau once described Cape Cod as a place "where a man may stand and put all of America behind him." Not so anymore.

A few years back, says Hiller, Wellfleet was caught flatfooted by an influx of applications from cell phone companies. It was a wake-up call and the Wellfleet Planning Board adopted a bylaw modeled after a code passed by the Cape Cod Commission, requiring cell phone antennas to be hidden in buildings, such as church steeples.

At a meeting at the Wellfleet Library in May 1998, Hiller first learned that the Congregational Church had negotiated contracts to put cellular antennas in its steeple. Omnipoint had thought the ideal place would be at the entrance to the town, but the Planning Board asked the company to place it in the steeple instead.

Wellfleet's bylaws permitted this, but local activists weren't satisfied, and public opposition grew. Among other objections, Hiller and her fellow activists were concerned that cell phone antennas might pose health hazards. No scientific studies to date support the claim that radiation from properly constructed antennas is harmful, but many people in Wellfleet and elsewhere believe otherwise.

In the view of Dale Donovan, a town selectman, the church steeple was a decent, realistic compromise. "Based on the law," he says, "this was exactly what we wanted." Yet he insists that when the Planning Board vote came out 3-2 against the antenna, he went to bat for the community because that was his job; the people had spoken.

Because of corporate personhood, however, Wellfleet, population 2,500, was like an ant facing off against Omnipoint the sumo wrestler, with a referee, in this case the law, turning a blind eye to the difference in weight class. At the time the Wellfleet dispute began in 1998, Omnipoint Communications had 1,300 employees and 200,000 customers; in 1999, it reported a gross profit of close to $90 million on $364 million in net sales. By contrast, Wellfleet's total spending from the general fund in 1999 was just over $8 million.