UPDATE With unanimous support, the Vestavia Hills City Council voted in favor of installing 5G poles alongside Massey Road, reports the Vestavia Voice. The Alabama town is still working through a legal challenge from the wealthy Crossgate neighborhood. While not all Massey Road residents were supportive of the rollout, neighbors like Anthony Krontiras told the Voice that he has had productive talks with Alabama Power and Crown Castle.
“We’ve met several times about placement and options,” Krontiras noted. “We’re trying to eliminate having two poles 12 feet apart from each other in our front yard.” The parties have agreed that once Alabama Power completes its plan to move its utilities underground, Crown Castle will coordinate placing one of its 30-foot 5G poles next to the power company’s pole.
“The bottom line is we work in the city; we have to be courteous to each other, and that’s the only way things get done,” Krontiras said, explaining why he has chosen to work with Crown Castle, despite some initial reservations about the rollout. “If you just fight, fight, fight, … then you really don’t get anything accomplished. It was my hope that we may be able to postpone this [rollout] until then,” he added. “It sounds like that is not an option at this point just because of the delay this happened already, but I wanted to make sure that we’re all on record knowing that Crown Castle has agreed that when that does happen, that they would move that pole adjacent to the existing pole.”
Concerned resident Michelle Williams told the Council that she has concerns about studies that suggest that 5G may represent a health risk to humans. In response, Councilwoman Kimberly Cook pointed to a recent study by a professor emeritus in electronic engineering at the Alabama Center for Economic Business and Research. The results of that study concluded that “the frequencies that 5G operates on are in the upper and lower limits of the WiFi that virtually every one of us has in our homes and at much lower power levels,” Cook noted.
Mayor Ashley Curry added that Vestavia Hills has researched this issue and agrees with the findings of the American Cancer Society which asserts that 5G communications do not represent a health risk. With a unanimous vote in favor of the project, the city will begin installing 5G poles in the right-of-way space on Massey Road. No completion date has been announced at this time, according to the Vestavia Voice.
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