Update 01/18/2026: Looks like we are finally seeing some movement regarding the connection between health issues (primarily cancer) and cell towers. Thank you, RFK Jr.! 

https://x.com/afpost/status/2012360911458382081?s=42

"All that is necessary for the Triumph of Evil is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke

HISTORY OF THE SAN ELIJO CELL TOWER PROJECT: 

On Saturday, May 11, 2024, the Saturday before Mother's Day, about 28 of the 140 homeowners of the Solaire townhouses of San Marcos received a letter from the City of Carlsbad in the mail to notify residents closest to the proposed tower site of a Minor Conditional Use Permit application. Residents requested the necessary documentation from the city and learned that Verizon Wireless requested that special building permit. Per citizen request, an administrative hearing with the City Planner Eric Lardy was set for Tuesday, June 11, 2024, where concerned residents could voice their opinion.

CBS News reporter Abbie Black covered this story on Wednesday, June 12, 2024, in the 5 p.m. news  (2:39 min clip). 

Within proximity of the proposed cell tower site are the following communities, which also were notified of the planned project:

Camden Old Creek apartments, Hunters Pointe apartments, Solaire, LaCosta Oaks, Larkspur Creek, Melrose Villas, Calico Bluffs, Larkspur Heights, Laurel, and Magnolia.

Also directly affected are the businesses of Everbrook Academy Preschool with their playground right next to the planned site, a planned Memory Care facility, project Sunrise of San Marcos, project SDP23-0002, and Hunter Industries.

 

 

A small group of concerned residents spoke at the administrative hearing. Some neighbors who attended that meeting only knew about this project through this petition that was also shared on NextDoor and Facebook. 

However, after the administrative hearing in June, on Wednesday, July 10, 2024, the City Planner notified us that he granted Verizon the Minor Conditional Use Permit (CUP 2023-0006, VZW FILOLI) to build that 41-foot cell tower in the residential area at the corner of San Elijo and Rancho Santa Fe Road.

With this approval, the La Costa Oaks Association was able to enter into a lease with Verizon for approximately 30 years. The annual lease agreement amount is typically between $35,000-$39,000, resulting in a revenue stream of less than $4 per home per month for the 820-home community. 

Once signed, that lease agreement would allow Verizon to add more panels to the cell tower at their discretion, without any approval or oversight from the city ever again. Additional wireless companies could easily be granted permission to add their antennas to the existing tower structure as well.

The binding nature of this lease would remain in place, regardless of what more will be learned in the future (or is already widely known but is suppressed or censored) about cell towers and their impacts on people, pets, and our environment.

THE CITY OF CARLSBAD WAS UNDER NO LEGAL OBLIGATION TO MAKE THIS SPECIAL ALLOWANCE. 

According to Verizon's website, they already established a network with full coverage in this area. Please see their own website advertising below:

 

 

By current law, cities are obligated to allow wireless companies to establish a network. A network exists where people can place a phone call, as this is the primary business model for a wireless company: offering cell phone service. That required network already exists in this area. The provision of a network does not mean that people must be able to watch live TV shows in their cars during every minute of the day and on every inch of our roadways and streets while driving. There is already a different technology and application for that purpose in place. It is called a wired internet connection or cable service, and the location of the TV is usually a living room in a home.

Therefore, a need for the tower was NOT established.

The concerned neighbors from the administrative hearing gathered and mobilized the La Costa Oaks HOA board and homeowners. Most homeowners were taken by surprise, as they had no idea that this project was planned. 

Parallel to the community awakening efforts, we also filed the paperwork with the City of Carlsbad and paid the $900 fee for an appeal hearing before the City Planning Commission. The date for that hearing was never set but would have likely been in late October or November of 2024.

In the meantime, through the diligence and hard work of a few La Costa Oaks homeowners, over 50 homeowners showed up at the August HOA Board meeting and loudly voiced their opposition to the planned tower project. The HOA Board voted right at that meeting 4-1 to stop any further negotiations with Verizon and to withdraw their intent to lease that parcel for the tower site.

Late on Thursday, September 12, 2024, the City of Carlsbad informed us via email that Verizon withdrew their application for the CUP and requested that the appeal hearing before the Carlsbad City Planning Commission (which we had requested) be taken off the City's calendar.

Praise the Lord!

So why is this petition still up? Because the fight is not over. This is not a fight against 1 cell tower in 1 neighborhood.

There will be others. They may come from other wireless companies. And they can and will be in other cities. The next proposed tower may be next to your own home, or to the home your children just bought. Or it could be at the park where you walk your dogs. Maybe it will be next to your office, or the Costco you spend hours in on weekends. Or the tower site is planned on the school grounds or fields of the elementary, middle or high school your children or grandchildren attend. Or it could be by the college dorm your teenagers just went off to. Maybe they are even approaching your pastor to put a tower next to or even on the roof of your church.

This petition grew over time and became a valuable document with images and links to data and important resources like the Environmental Health Trust, and Children's Health Defense. 

If you read on, you will learn that cell towers should NEVER be closer than 1,640 feet to where people live, work, attend school, college, or church, go shopping or dancing, watch a movie, or relax and play. NEVER!

It takes a village to fight these corporations and to force the 3-letter agencies to update their regulations. Please use this petition as a sharing tool, so we can engage all people and make corporations listen to us. Reach out to your local legislators, mayors, school principals, pastors, church leaders, and anyone else who should know about the dangers of this technology.

Right up front: Are wireless companies aware of the harm their technology causes? YOU BET THEY ARE! Please see below the image of what companies state on their annual financial reports to shareholders (10-k reports): 

 

 

Watch this 4 1/2 minutes news report from Chicago from April 29, 2024: 

https://www.fox32chicago.com/video/1448169

Why do wireless companies need cell towers and "small cells" everywhere?

It's simple. Besides possible contract with government agencies, they want the consumers to abandon their in-home wired connections and cancel services from providers like Spectrum or COX Cable  with their fiber optics cable technology. Then consumers switch to companies like Verizon and connect no longer via safe wired connections but instead get their internet connectivity via wireless frequencies running freely through the air into their (and through their neighbors') homes. 

Why don’t wireless companies employ other known technologies that are available and considered safe? 

The answer is easy: They do cost more to install. Corporate greed at its best! 

Cell towers are NEVER appropriate for residential areas. These areas are not zoned for them due to their significant impacts on property values, technology concerns regarding the hackability and jammability of wireless security systems, aesthetics, and the established concerns regarding health and environmental safety. Even minimal exposure to a cell tower can lead to long-term adverse effects.  

Please see below images of a tree deteriorating over time while being exposed to a cell tower positioned 465 feet away at only 0.03% of the FCC "legal" radiation limits. Let that sink in - this is long-term exposure at 0.03% of the current limits legal in the U.S. according to the FCC regulations. 

 

 

The graph below shows how the U.S. FCC radiation limits compare to other countries: 

 

 

As of 2024, the FCC is still a captured agency. Several lawsuits against the FCC have been filed since 2021 when the FCC was ordered (ORDERED!) to provide scientific proof of the safety of their outdated guidelines from 1995, or to revise them. Until this day, the FCC has not complied with that court order. 

To quote Dr. Beatrice Golomb of the Golomb Research Group at the University of California, San Diego: "Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence".  And we DO have evidence and data. Lots of it. Please visit the website below for a deep dive into scientific data and the regulations in Europe. There is a reason why they have much lower limits than we here in the U.S. do.

https://createhealthyhomes.com/education/

The science is clear. More than 11,000 pages of data were submitted to the FCC; pages with data showing that the current radiation levels in the U.S. are causing harm to the environment, people, pets, and wildlife. Below is a graph that shows cancer cases in relation to cell tower proximity.

 

 

At the absolute bare minimum, people should live, work, go to school, worship, shop, and play at least 1,640 feet (500 meters!) away from a cell tower. 

 

 

See here what happens when towers are placed on buildings. In the example below, cell towers were placed on fire stations in California.

 

 

Within a week of installation in one station, most of the firefighters developed unusual symptoms of headaches, fatigue, insomnia, memory loss, confusion, nausea, and weakness. After a time, these firefighters in stations with adjacent cell towers were found to have forgotten CPR or became lost responding to a fire in a city they grew up in.

A neurologic study of 6 of these firefighters was commissioned by the International Association of Firefighters  (IAFF), led by Dr. Gunnar Heuser, to determine if there was any evidence of brain dysfunction in those exposed for long periods to first responder cell towers. Firefighters then began fighting cell towers as well as fires. 

The organizer of the study above filed a formal affidavit with the FCC. The International Association of Fire Fighters  opposed the placement of cell towers on fire stations and called for $1 Million in funding to study the health effects of towers on the firefighters, but, unfortunately, funding for that study failed. 

The City of Encinitas adopted Resolution 2020-38 (42 pages). Please note the page numbered 3/38 (page 7 of the document), especially section 2c (image excerpt below). The Encinitas City Council recognizes the amount of data that came to light in recent years, which starkly contradicts the current FCC regulation standards. 

 

 

The Carlsbad City Council denied an application for a cell tower at Poinsettia Park during the 4/16/2024 City Council meeting (3:14:34 long) because of concerns about its impacts and due to a large community uprising. At that time, the city stated both the need and their intention to revisit and update the city's outdated cell tower ordinance. Per conversation with the City of Carlsbad, that discussion will start in the fall of 2024 and come to a vote in the spring of 2025. 

Agenda item #13 of the Carlsbad City Council meeting from 04/16/2024:

• City Planner presentation: 34:29 min,
• Council member questions: 49:10 min,
• Public hearing: 1:00:12 hrs, closes at 2:29:49 hrs. (the appeal was denied by Mayor Blackburn)
• Council votes to deny contract with AT&T: 2:30:25 hrs. Suggested to revise city ordinance on placement of cell towers. 

Being "in compliance" with current (outdated) regulations does not mean the regulations are safe.

Think about the tobacco industry and its propaganda, and for how long people were led to believe that smoking came with a health benefit. Do you remember the movie "Thank You for Smoking"? But people had a choice to either believe the lies or not! 

Communities, businesses, and schools close to cell towers do not have a choice. They have to live with that technology all the time and cannot get away from it. Please see this presentation (4:05:43 long) to the Stamford Board of Representatives of the Land Use Committee from 10/18/2023, which provides arguments against cell towers, backed up by solid science and data.

 

 

Please help keep Cell Towers out of residential areas and areas where people live, learn, work, worship, and play for many hours per day. The image above shows the cell tower at San Marcos High School's football field. Does anyone honestly believe that this tower provides any benefits whatsoever to our students, their learning outcomes or to the health and work performance of the school employees who are exposed to that tower for 7-12 hours every day??? Please refer to the symptoms the firefighters had: brain fog, headaches, dizziness, memory loss, ringing tone in head or ears... https://x.com/sanmarcosusd?s=11

Please help us in this fight to keep all cell towers at least 1,640 feet away from residences, parks, schools, workplaces, and recreational areas. 

Encourage the cities of Carlsbad and San Marcos (and every other city in this country) to update their ordinance to keep cell towers out of residential areas, schools, churches, public buildings, and recreational areas by signing and sharing this petition.

For more information on the effects of cell towers, please watch this  59-minute presentation by renowned industry expert Dr. Kent Chamberlin of the New Hampshire Commission. The presentation has slides loaded with images and links to new data. ( Dr. Chamberlin also advised a local school in La Jolla and spoke at a community event in November of 2024)

You may also want to watch this 5-minute video, which I found on the Idahoans for Safe Technology website. There are no safety studies in place for this technology. As quoted in this short video: "We are flying blind". And so we are... 

Food for thought: Would any of the stakeholders who are proposing this technology being employed and built close to residences, schools, places of work, and parks drink the water Erin Brockovich offered the Pacific Gas & Electric lawyer???

ON A VERY RELATED NOTE... so-called "SMART METERS"...

Please know that there is also a mountain of evidence available that points to humans and pets as well as plants having adverse reactions to “smart” meters.

 

 

The most common symptoms for humans and pets (yes, also our pets!) are sleep disorders (like Insomnia), brain fog, ringing in the ears (like tinnitus), dizziness, nausea, headaches, and heart palpitations!

Have you found yourself waking up many nights between 2-3 a.m., sometimes at the exact same minute every night, regardless of what time you went to sleep that evening? That is the time of night when a lot of data is being dumped from those meters onto the utility company’s (yes, SDG&E, I’m referring to you!) servers. And the transmission goes straight through your home. Even if your “smart” meter is in the garage below the bedroom floor or outside of the home, all the electric wiring in the home functions as antennas. If you notice that your pets get up every night at the same time, that should be a good indicator that those meters reach the inside of your home. 

In California, by law, residents can refuse a "smart" meter and request the installation of an analog meter. Let's give Peter the Meter Reader his job back! @SDG&E

For more information on the "smart" meter topic, please see this brief (35 pages) filed by New Mexicans for Utility Safety.

If you prefer to watch a video, this CHD show (53:32 min) has a testimony and lots of information on the topic.

Below is the link to a podcast from July 12, 2024, with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the dangers of EMFs:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/emr-cell-phones-and-cancer-with-dr-paul-heroux/id1552000243?i=1000662251762

Every day, more people become aware that the-multi-trillion dollar (or Euro) corporations only think about their profits without any consideration whatsoever of the effects on the people and the environment. 

Let’s listen to the people who are sick from this unsafe technology and let’s protect them, our children, our families, and our pets from the harm of unsafe technology that has one purpose, and one purpose only:  to make large corporations more profit and to please their shareholders.

Are your family and pets worth some corporation’s bottom line???

RESOURCES:

Many non-profit organizations educate people on the dangers of wireless technology. I want to extend my heart-felt thanks to the people (you know who you are) who not only educated us on the subject but also assisted us with the strategy to fight back. This is truly a David versus Goliath situation. This petition has many links to council hearings, interviews, and presentations, which mostly came from the resources below. 

1.     Environmental Health Trust, https://ehtrust.org The website has a wealth of information. Their Board of Directors and contributors are industry experts, and they work on a volunteer basis to educate people like you and me. Please consider contributing to their hard work and efforts.

2.     Children’s Health Defense – RFK Jr.’s organization – a valuable resource for so many reasons. 

3.     Massachusetts for Safe Technology is a group that also educates residents about the harm EMFs cause to humans, pets, and plants. They are currently litigating. Their website has a wealth of data available to anyone who wants to look for the truth. 

If you want your voice to be heard in Carlsbad/San Marcos, California, please contact the folks listed below:

Planning Commission
City of Carlsbad
planning@carlsbadca.gov

Keith Blackburn
Carlsbad Mayor
keith.blackburn@carlsbadca.gov
760-579-1462

Jeff Murphy
Director of Community Development
Jeff.Murphy@carlsbadca.gov
442-339-5088

Eric Lardy
City Planner
Eric.Lardy@carlsbadca.gov
442-339-2712

Edward Valenzuela
Associate Planner
Edward.Valenzuela@carlsbadca.gov
442-339-2624

Cliff Jones
Principal Planner
Cliff.Jones@carlsbadca.gov
442-339-2613

Melanie Burkholder
Carlsbad Council Member, District 1
melanie.burkholder@carlsbadca.gov
442-637-2853

Carolyn Luna
Carlsbad Council Member, District 2
carolyn.luna@carlsbadca.gov 
442-339-2830

Priya Bhat-Patel
Carlsbad Council Member, District 3
priya.bhat-patel@carlsbadca.gov
760-473-8726

Teresa Acosta
Carlsbad Council Member, District 4
teresa.acosta@carlsbadca.gov
442-200-8748

Kyle Van Leeuwen
Land Developer
kyle.vanleeuwen@carlsbadca.gov
442-339-2611

Jennifer Goswami
LaCosta Oaks Association Board President
lcomgt@keystonepacific.com
760-943-6650

Marty Ignacio
Keystone Pacific General Manager
mignacio@keystonepacific.com
800-455-6423, ext. 3

Jill Cleveland
Verizon Project Manager
Jill.Cleveland@plancominc.com
760-420-4833

Rebecca Jones
San Marcos Mayor
rjones@san-marcos.net

Gina Jackson
San Marcos Planning Division
gjackson@san-marcos.net
 
Beth Herzog
San Marcos Admin Services Manager
bherzog@san-marcos.net
 
Maria Nunez
San Marcos City Council Member
mnunez@san-marcos.net
 
Mike Sanella
San Marcos City Council Member
msannella@san-marcos.net

Danielle LeBlang
San Marcos City Council Member
dleblang@san-marcos.net
 
Ed Musgrove
San Marcos City Council Member
EMusgrove@san-marcos.net

THANK YOU for your support! Please share this petition far and wide.