City Caps Height Of Broadcast Towers -- Hostile Crowd Boos Decision To Allow Minor Increase

City Council members were booed, heckled and driven from council chambers twice, but they passed an ordinance limiting the height of broadcast towers in Seattle to 1,100 feet above sea level - 100 feet higher than any of them are now.

Even that modest increase was too much for a raucous band of about 50 people from Citizens Against Tower Expansion who wanted the council to pass an ordinance freezing the height of the city's six broadcast towers - three each atop Queen Anne and Capitol hills.

And the ordinance may be too late to stop the city's three network-affiliated broadcast stations from raising their towers. Attorneys for the stations, KOMO, KING and KIRO, are meeting with the city's building and law departments to determine whether permit applications by the stations are so far along the ordinance doesn't apply.

The stations applied to the city in 1986 to raise their towers. The KOMO, KING and KIRO radio and television broadcast towers are currently 556 feet, 573 feet and 613 feet from ground level, respectively. The stations wanted to replace their towers with new ones 900 to 1,000 feet tall - 1,400 feet above sea level. The new ordinance would limit the height increase to about 100 feet for each tower.

"Why are you ignoring the concerns of the citizens of Seattle?" a couple of protesters yelled toward the six council members - all of whom voted for the limit yesterday.

"How'd you like it (a tower) next to your house?" someone hollered.

Testimony not allowed

The council doesn't allow public testimony at its regular Monday meeting - only at public hearings and committee meetings. As the noise and frustration increased, Council President George Benson tried to quiet the protest by temporarily adjourning the meeting.

But as the council members filed from the room the first time, they were followed by calls of "cowards," "sleazeball" and "Come on, George, come out where we can see you."

Benson, a 20-year council veteran, could remember only one other time disruption has forced the council to adjourn. That was two years ago in hearings over the drug-loitering ordinance.

The council members - Benson; Sue Donaldson, head of the Land Use Committee and author of the proposal; Sherry Harris; Jane Noland; Margaret Pageler;,and Tom Weeks - returned about 10 minutes after their first exit yesterday. They quickly sat down and passed the ordinance on a roll call vote before many of the protesters realized what was happening.

A hostile audience

As the council moved on to the next item, the hostile audience, realizing defeat, began a steady booing and more heckling.

Benson again adjourned the meeting, this time for a half hour, and the broadcast tower opponents dispersed.

"I thought that the height limits were a real breakthrough," said a puzzled Donaldson, who believed that the Queen Anne and Capitol Hill residents feared megatowers.

Donaldson said she sought a compromise that would head off potential construction of massive new towers nearly twice as high as the present ones.

The new ordinance gives broadcasters some flexibility to adapt to new technology, said Donaldson. She has worked for about two years with an advisory committee of citizens and broadcasters to solve issues related to the broadcast towers and electromagnetic radiation levels.

Donaldson's ordinance doesn't allow the bases of the towers to be enlarged. It also limits any antennas built atop the Columbia Center to about 50 feet high. Proposals have called for 300- to 400-foot antenna towers atop the roof of the Northwest's tallest building.

Last year Donaldson pushed changes in the land-use code to ban new towers in residential areas.

Wanted no change

Citizens Against Tower Expansion wanted to keep the towers as they are, forcing the stations to put new towers outside the city to adapt to new technology, such as high-definition television , which is expected in the next several years.

"Rather than striking a compromise (now) . . . , the council should not allow them (the towers) to be upgraded," said Bradley Simmons, a Queen Anne resident. Then, at the end of their useful life, the towers would have to be relocated.

Donaldson hopes the ordinance does just that, eventually forcing the broadcasters to move their towers to uninhabited areas such as Cougar and Tiger mountains in eastern King County.

"We want to say no new towers," said Donaldson. "We want to encourage them to move out of town."

That's not practical, said Don Wilkinson, vice president and director of engineering for Fisher Broadcasting - KOMO-TV. An antenna located to the east would mean "ghosts" or shadows in reception because the hills in the Seattle area generally form north-south ridges, he said.

Ordinance may not apply

Building officials are still discussing the issue with the city's Law Department following assertions by the stations' attorneys that at least some of them have "vested" permit rights for towers 950 to 1,000 feet above the hilltops.

Allowing the towers to expand leaves open questions about the health effects of exposure to electromagnetic radiation, an issue that concerns many of the Queen Anne residents near the existing towers.

Though he agrees that scientific opinion is divided on whether low doses of electromagnetic radiation are harmful to humans, Jim Bodoia, a Queen Anne resident and member of the citizens committee advising Donaldson, says the city should err on the side of caution and not allow tower expansion for that reason.

If the towers are allowed to grow, they will remain as radiation sources in residential neighborhoods for decades to come, said Bodoia.

The council, under Donaldson's lead, already has reduced the allowable ground-level electromagnetic radiation to 200 microwatts, only one-fifth of the present federal standard, she said.