Convinced local officials were deadlocked and time was running out, Colorado Republican Sen. Wayne Allard decided to discreetly present a bill that would allow a digital TV tower to be built on Lookout Mountain.
The bill, co-sponsored by Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., was introduced Wednesday in the U.S. Senate. It was was bundled with more than 30 bills considered noncontroversial.
If the new tower is not in place by Feb. 17, 2009 – the Federal Communications Commission’s deadline for digital transmissions – Denver metro residents who receive free broadcast television would lose all television service.
Without the legislation, Colorado would not have had the infrastructure to meet the federal deadline, according to Colorado’s senators.
“We were either going to go digital or we were going to go dark,” said Sean Conway, Allard’s chief of staff. “Sen. Allard believed that was not acceptable.
By a voice vote of those senators present, the bill passed by unanimous consent Wednesday night. House action is pending.
The legislation, which would essentially push aside local jurisdictions on the matter, stunned Golden officials and activists who opposed the tower’s location.
“If this can be done to us, no community is safe from having their local rights taken away from them,” said Deb Carney, attorney for a group of Lookout Mountain-area homeowner associations – Canyon Area Residents for the Environment – that fought the tower.
Jefferson County officials had “no idea” the bill was coming, said Kevin McCasky, chairman of the Board of County Commissioners.
The county board has been considering a rezoning request from a local TV station consortium to build a 730-foot-high digital tower on Lookout Mountain.
The consortium, called Lake Cedar Group, contends Lookout Mountain is the best site to broadcast the widest coverage. Opponents have raised concerns about health effects, electronic interference and tower failure.
In Golden, e-mails and phone calls coming into city hall on Friday indicate “people are pretty outraged,” City Manager Mike Bestor said.
“Even people who have no position on the tower have a position on fairness,” Bestor said. “People are upset with the process.”
Seven years of rezoning hearings and court cases “were just window dressing,” Carney added.
It was the protracted battle over the Lake Cedar Group’s tower proposal that led to Allard’s decision, Conway said.
Negotiations had broken down with the city of Golden, Conway said, adding that Golden had stopped talking to Allard’s office in the past two months.
Allard was waiting to introduce the bill, Conway said, because he was “holding out hope that some accommodation on the local level could be done.”
Conway said citizen concerns were taken into account when drafting the bill, which limits construction to one tower and limits the height to being lower than the highest existing tower, which is 834 feet.
Two years are needed to take down the existing tower and put up the new one, Conway noted.
Salazar said congressional action was needed “to ensure that Colorado does not become a dark hole of digital broadcasting.”
Marv Rockford, spokesman for Lake Cedar Group, said Denver “is the only TV market of any consequence that has not deployed this technology.”
If the federal deadline is not met, the FCC could redeploy the current analog frequencies, Rockford said.
The TV consortium “had been talking to the Colorado congressional delegation for years” about the situation, Rockford said, including within the past week.
Salazar spokesman Drew Nannis said Allard, as bill sponsor, handled the timing. “We had an opportunity to get this done, and we took it,” Nannis said. “To paint the timing as something nefarious or underhanded is simply wrong.”
All of the members of the Colorado delegation in the U.S. House were told about the bill early in the week and none objected, Conway said.
Republican Reps. Bob Beauprez and Tom Tancredo, and Democrat Mark Udall – who represent portions of Jefferson County – did not immediately respond Friday to requests for comment about the legislation.
The debate’s tenor shifted for Allard in April when Golden began a condemnation action for the 65-acre proposed tower site on Lookout Mountain, Conway said. The property is owned by the TV stations and is outside of Golden.
Bestor said the congressional action “doesn’t impact our ability to use eminent domain.” He also suggested there could be a challenge to the legislation’s constitutionality.
Staff writer Ann Schrader can be reached at 303-278-3217 or aschrader@denverpost.com.
