The City Council this past week narrowly rejected a proposal to expand an existing cell tower at Westmoor High School, siding with residents concerned about aesthetic and health issues.

The telecommunications company Verizon Wireless previously was granted an “administrative use permit” to put its own array of six antennas on a pole currently being used by another cell provider, T-Mobile.

But residents in the area appealed that approval, and the council ultimately voted 3-2 to uphold their challenge.

Mayor Carol Klatt and Councilman Michael Guingona dissented.

In their appeal, residents complained about the project’s potential for visual intrusiveness. The project could also lower property values, they said.

Moreover, the additional antennas would increase health risks in their neighborhood from electromagnetic-field emissions, they argued.

Vice Mayor Sal Torres agreed with the residents’ arguments. “There ought to be a way to put (such projects) underground so that they don’t adversely impact the aesthetics, the community and the safety of people,” Torres said Friday.

Verizon also hasn’t demonstrated enough of a cell-coverage gap to warrant installing its antennas, he said.

Verizon spokeswoman Heidi Flato said she first needed to research the matter before she could respond.

The council went against the city staff’s recommendation to deny the residents’ appeal. The existing pole is already disguised asa tree, the staff said, and Verizon’s project would just blend into that design.

An EMF study indicated that the project would meet federal standards for permissible human exposure to such radiation.

Guingona was inclined to agree that the project would pose no serious health hazards.

“If we really do believe that there is some sort of health risk to this … then we should be working to dismantle the (cell towers) that we already do have,” he said during the council meeting. “If it is true that this is a health risk, then why should some parts of this community be subject to it and some parts not subject to it? I can’t reconcile those two things.”

Cell towers have stirred much controversy in Daly City and elsewhere in recent years.

Last year, a T-Mobile project in another part of Daly City generated strong neighborhood opposition before it was narrowly approved by the council.

In a recent report, the San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury acknowledged the public’s concerns about health and other issues regarding cell towers. But cities need to balance those concerns with consumer demand for improved wireless reception, the grand jury said.

Cell towers can also serve as a revenue source for San Mateo County and its cities, the grand jury said. “The county and cities which have cell towers located on public property should establish lease agreements with service providers to generate revenue to the general fund.”

By Neil Gonzales
ngonzales@bayareanewsgroup.com
Contact at 650-348-4338.

But as Daly City nears its centennial Tuesday, it does so as a greatly different city than when it was first founded.

Starting as a safe haven for refugees displaced after San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, Daly City has evolved into a complex city of its own, becoming, among other things, home to an immense Filipino population.

In many ways, Guingona — the city’s first elected official of Filipino ancestry and the county’s first Filipino mayor — helped usher in the new political reality for the city nestled against San Francisco’s southern border.

“It was an interesting time back then,” said Guingona, a Daly City resident for all of his 49 years, recalling his childhood and the steady growth of his Filipino community. “Community empowerment equals political empowerment, and that’s how I came to be.”

Seeking to define a community in the 1970s, Guingona and other residents rallied behind their families and churches, weaving their culture and eventually businesses into the city’s fabric.

Reaching back to his boyhood, Guingona recalled the founding of St. Andrew’s Catholic Church — an operation that stemmed from Filipino nationals feeling out of place in surrounding parishes, and establishing their own place of worship in a hardware store.

From the hardware store, Guingona and other worshipers moved to a cafeteria at Serramonte High School. Through heavy fundraising, the booming Filipino community established St. Andrew’s and brought in Filipino priests who conducted masses in Tagalog.

“The community realized that nobody was going to build this church for them,” Guingona said. “So we built it ourselves.”

In 1911, the sleepy town was incorporated into San Mateo County on March 22, four days after the townsmen raced to the polls to decide the issue. With the election taking place before woman’s suffrage, Daly City’s incorporation was close — with 138 men voting for and 136 voting against becoming its own city, according to the March 24, 1911, edition of the Colma Record.

In the following decades, Daly City’s modest population steadily grew from 3,779 in 1920 to 15,191 by 1950. The once quiet farm community inhabited by earthquake refugees nearly tripled its residents a decade later, recording 44,791 inhabitants, according to a state historical population report.

With about 35 percent of its current 101,123 population being Filipino, Daly City is one of the largest cities in the county and has the highest concentration of Filipino and Filipino-Americans of any American midsized city in the United States, author Benito Vergara said.

Vergara studied Daly City’s Filipino community for nearly four years before publishing “Pinoy Capital: the Filipino Nation in Daly City” in 2009.

“The reason they liked it was not because it was cold, but there were other Filipino that were there,” Vergara said, citing that many new residents were homesick for the friendships created back in their native land.

Vergara cites the passing of the Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965 as easing the path for people to immigrate and work in the U.S., ushering the first wave of Filipino immigration to Daly City.

Seton Medical Center, for instance, started recruiting nurses from The Philippines shortly after 1965. Other Daly City employers began recruiting working professionals from The Philippines around that time as well. By the 1970s, Filipino workers began petitioning for relatives back home to join them in Daly City, creating a “chain migration,” Vergara said. Another wave came in the mid-1980s, during the fall of Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos.

“The beauty about this place is that it’s truly a melting pot,” Guingona said. “I want to make sure that when I leave office, it’s better than when I got here.”

aterrazas@sfexaminer.com