Nextel’s Antenna Proposal Rejected

Moving to preserve the aesthetics of Black Mountain and conform to the Ojai Valley Area Plan, county planning officials decided unanimously Thursday to deny Nextel Communications’ proposal to plant a 78-foot-tall cellular phone tower on the Ojai ridgeline.

Nextel Communications can either appeal the Planning Commission’s decision to the Board of Supervisors or apply for permission to put the tower on another site, Planning Commissioner Brian Brennan said after the hearing.

He said that Airtouch Cellular already has a 50-foot tower on Black Mountain, and that another antenna would not be “for the greater good of the community,” as called for in the Ojai Area Plan.

“We have empirical evidence of how the county planning division approves one tower after another, creating an antenna farm that . . . would look like industrial blight,” said Russ Baggerly, president of Citizens to Preserve the Ojai.

The community is not opposed to new technology, just to where Nextel wants to put it, Baggerly said after the Planning Commission’s decision.

“The issue is that the new industry has got to do a better job of finding sites for their towers that don’t degrade the community,” he said. “It’s simple.”

Ojai officials and other residents agreed that if Nextel wants to do business in Ojai, it will have to find a site that will not disrupt the residents, the environment or the sales tax revenue.

“We don’t want to see a number of these antennas sticking up like hatpins all over the hillsides,” Councilwoman Nina Shelley said.

“It’s not only an issue of aesthetics, but it is also an economic issue, because if we let Ojai become degraded or deteriorated . . . then people who come here will cease to be enchanted by the beauty they find here,” Shelley said.

Business at the Ojai Valley Inn resort, the city’s main source of revenue, would decline if the view of Black Mountain were tainted by the 78-foot antenna, thus decreasing Ojai’s sales and transient occupancy taxes, she added.

“But the primary thing is that Ojai Valley is a very ecologically sensitive, fragile environment,” she said.