Whether four Denver commercial television stations can consolidate their antennas on a proposed 730-foot Lookout Mountain tower to meet a 2009 federal deadline for switching to high-definition TV has turned into a battle royal between NIMBYists and broadcasters.
The city of Golden has entered the fray, threatening to condemn the 80-acre site outside its city limits, putting the consortium on notice that it’s offering $1.68 million for the site.
Television pioneers put towers on Lookout 50 years ago because it was the best location, according to Marv Rockford, a principal of the Lake Cedar Group. The consortium of KCNC-Channel 4, KMGH-Channel 7, KUSA-Channel 9 and KTVD-Channel 20 was formed in 1997 to build a single tower to replace four existing ones. Its rezoning application was rejected, approved in modified form, and then partly rejected again by the Jefferson County Commission this summer. Opponents under the banner of Canyon Area Residents for the Environment sued and won a court stay in 2003. In September, on remand from the court, commissioners held that Lake Cedar hadn’t shown that a multiple-tower collapse posed no risk to homes.
Rockford disputes that, saying that towers seldom fall, but when they do, they’re designed to collapse in a zig-zag pattern. “They don’t fall like trees,” he said, and even if that happened, the tower would fall within the site.
CARE attorney Deb Carney says two towers collapsed on the mountain during construction in the 1950s. “The FM and television signal up here is so powerful that it is probably several million times more than what’s necessary,” she said, asserting Federal Communications Commission safety standards are inadequate.
Rockford says there’s “no credible evidence that radio frequency (energy) has any health impacts on human beings,” adding that transmissions would be only 5 percent of the permissible level.
The site is outside Golden’s city limits but would be “very, very close to our neighborhoods and will be a scar on the side of the mountain,” said Golden City Manager Mike Bestor. He suggests Squaw Mountain in Clear Creek County as an alternative, but Rockford says that site couldn’t reach 245,000 homes west of Wadsworth Boulevard, and Clear Creek County already has said no.
About 80 percent of metro homes have cable or satellite TV, but the rest rely on free broadcast TV for information and entertainment. The public interest of providing this important medium to them far outweighs the objections of NIMBYists and late-blooming aesthetes.
