Walnut Creek

The City of Walnut Creek voted to move forward on  4/7/20, allowing the City Manager to sign three MLA (Master License  Agreements) with three carriers, even after pleas from citizens  requesting that they postpone this meeting and all unnecessary meetings  until after the Shelter-in-Place was lifted. Since these Agreements have  been in the process for two years, it seems illogical that they needed to rush a hearing during the Shutdown and it seems that there is a lack of  transparency as the City never reached out to the community to make us,  it’s constituents, aware.
 

These Agreements are the beginning of a planned build out that will impact not only the downtown area, but will soon begin creeping into the neighborhoods surrounding Walnut Creek downtown. The City must anticipate many more small Wireless Telecommunications Facilities (sWTF’s) as 5G must be placed in close proximity to the user and densely populated in order to work, with estimates of one antenna every 500 feet. With more Carriers adding their antennas and expanding the current boundaries, there will be many more than the anticipated 300 of these antennas in the City. Because of this, every resident has “standing” as it will impact us all! 

The installation of these facilities amounts to a huge public works project impacting the entire City. This includes the administration of getting permits, coordinating inspections, creating traffic control plans, tree trimming or cutting, road trenching,  running fiber optics, installing the antenna and finally pavement resurfacing for every sWTF installed. The scale of these projects throughout the City should have been a catalyst for the city to notify the broader community; advising us that this was happening. City officials could have reached out via Walnut Creek “In A Nutshell” , the Contra Costa Times, Patch.com or on Nextdoor or even placed it in a prominent location on the City website. But the City failed to even consider collaborating with citizens and failed to recognize their responsibility to their citizens. Perhaps this wasn’t intentional or a legal obligation, but many cities in the Bay Area - Orinda, Lafayette, Moraga and Berkley, have reached out to their citizens as a way of partnering with them. Why not Walnut Creek?

As well, in the days leading up to this meeting, citizens had problems connecting with officials. Often, our calls were met by voicemail prompts and many times, officials failed to get back to us in a timely manner, if at all. We couldn't even get simple questions answered as there was no staff available to answer them.

On top of this, the City chose to use the teleconferencing platform Zoom, even though information about the integrity of this platform has been in the news and information about this was forwarded to them. The FBI is investigating multiple incidents of video hijacking. The website Motherboard found that Zoom was sharing data with Facebook, even data on people who are not Facebook users. Zoom is basically malware and security researchers have called Zoom “a privacy disaster” and “fundamentally corrupt” as allegations of the company mishandling user data snowball; to include no end to end encryption, app surveillance issues, and selling user data. 

Knowing all of this, the City chose to move forward with this virtual meeting using this platform and it makes me question their ability to look out for their constituents. For all these reasons, I am requesting that the City’s actions on 4/7/2020 regarding the Master License Agreement be rescinded and that the city refrain from addressing permits and any new cell antennas until the Covid-19 threat has completely resolved, to include City staff availability.  Making decisions on issues without more transparency, accountability and collaboration during the Shelter-In-Place period and without full public access to participate in the process is unacceptable.