A redesigned AT&T cell tower near the Point Reyes Lighthouse got county approval last month after a back-and-forth over the use of a fake pine tree design.
At an April 21 hearing, the Marin County Deputy Zoning Administrator authorized a 60-foot steel pole to replace a similarly tall wooden radio tower on a ridge above Sir Francis Drake Boulevard just west of the fork with Chimney Rock Road. The decision reversed a staff recommendation to disguise the structure as a pine tree and came after a lengthy exchange with the California Coastal Commission over the pole’s appearance.
While AT&T awaits a final green light from the coastal commission, county planner Immanuel Bereket expressed frustration with what he described as contradictory and inconsistent input from the state agency.
“They want it both ways,” Mr. Bereket said. “They don’t want wireless; they want wireless. They don’t want it concealed; they want it concealed. When they go back and say ‘nevermind,’ it places us in a really precarious position. We know there’s a need for cell service out there, for safety purposes.”
Most lighthouse visitors likely don’t notice the 60-foot, cable-stayed twin wooden radio poles that have stood above the road since the 1950s. AT&T’s consultants applied in 2020 for a relatively inconspicuous new steel tower that would have replaced one of the wooden poles and stood six feet shorter. Federal law blocks local governments from exercising much control over cellular infrastructure, but the county may make aesthetic choices and require so-called “stealthing” of towers as trees, water towers or buildings.
Yet “because the property is located in an undeveloped area with little tree canopy, a stealth design would not effectively disguise the pole or make it more compatible with the site or its surroundings,” Mr. Bereket wrote in his 2020 staff recommendation. “The antenna is gray in color and will blend with the typical overcast and gray skies that are common in West Marin.”
In simulation photos, the narrow steel structure was hardly visible from a distance, scarcely more noticeable than the existing wooden pole. The county conditionally approved the project that year, and the phone company’s wireless consultants agreed it was best not to conceal the tower.
Then came a new amended application from Complete Wireless Consulting on behalf of AT&T. Last December, the company asked to extend the planned steel pole from 54 feet to 60 feet, the height of the current wooden pole. The amendment also sought to lengthen each antenna by seven feet and add microwave dishes, citing the need to receive and transmit signals from another tower in Sonoma County. But in subsequent correspondence, the coastal commission questioned whether the proposed tower was the “minimum height necessary,” and it raised concerns over the pole’s potentially jarring appearance.
In a staff report that sought to respond to those issues, Mr. Bereket newly recommended a faux-pine structure called a monopine, complete with brown and green paint and fake branches shielding the antennae from view. In simulation photos, the design appeared to create a much more eye-catching silhouette in the treeless landscape. In its staff report, the county wrote that a plain steel pole “would introduce an obtrusive structure in an otherwise minimally developed, non-urbanized area and would affect the visual character and quality of the site and its surroundings as viewed from publicly accessible areas.”
Mr. Bereket suggested the company could plant more trees on the site to help further mask the pole.
Yet neither the coastal commission nor AT&T were happy with the new design. On April 15, Complete Wireless Consulting reiterated in an email to Mr. Bereket that the cell company felt the plain pole would “fit the site better” than the pine and warned that the tree-like “crown” of the monopine would add six feet to the structure. “Without the faux crown, the silhouette resembles a toilet brush,” consultant Kevin Gallagher wrote. He doubted that planting new trees on the small, windswept parcel would be feasible.
That same week, the coastal commission balked at the faux-pine design, arguing it was no more in line with the visual resources policy in Marin’s Local Coastal Program. “We do not find that the proposed faux pine concealment of the monopole will minimize visual impact here, as there are no surrounding trees with which this could blend in,” Julia Koppman Norton, the commission’s regional supervisor, wrote in an email. “As such, we do not find this to be L.C.P.-consistent with respect to reducing impact to visual resources and would recommend exploring alternatives to this end.”
Mr. Bereket said he asked Ms. Norton for more input on the design, but the commission didn’t respond in time for the D.Z.A. hearing. In the end, the deputy zoning administrator, Michelle Levenson, scrapped the monopine design, approving an unadorned steel pole. Barring an appeal by the commission, the project can proceed.
The county’s power to govern the placement of towers is strictly curtailed by the Federal Communications Commission, which forces local governments to approve any tower that would fill in a service gap. Yet cell infrastructure has met community resistance in Marin, and county elected officials have tried to boost their influence as much as possible, creating new aesthetic and procedural guidelines for cell towers in 2019.
In 2020, AT&T sued Marin County in federal court after its application for a bell tower-shaped cell tower on the grounds of Saint Luke’s Presbyterian Church in San Rafael was denied on aesthetic grounds. A judge upheld two of the county’s counterarguments, finding the cell company failed to flesh out design alternatives, and the case was dismissed last month. Court documents show AT&T will apply again to build a tower on the church property, this time disguised as a pine tree.