Reporting by Meilin Rife, Darshan Bal and Emma Shen
In fall 2023, nurse and San Mateo resident Irena Mavridis received a letter from the city informing her that a cell tower would be built within 500 feet of her home, and that there would only be a five-day period from that point to appeal the decision.
Small cell facilities are small radio antennas attached to utility poles that are used as a way to deliver 5G mobile service. Mavridis’ contention is that these facilities are not used for cell coverage, but rather wireless broadband internet — a service that provides WiFi wirelessly using radio waves. This, she holds, can be achieved through alternative technologies such as fiber-optic internet, therefore rendering small cell facilities futile.
Mavridis thus founded a volunteer advocacy group, No Cell Outs, along with fellow San Mateo residents Lindsay Raike and Kelly Ryerson, garnering hundreds of supporters to raise funds for an attorney and petition the city. Since its formation, No Cell Outs has successfully cancelled the installations of 130 cell towers throughout San Mateo — most recently one in close proximity to Saint Matthew’s Episcopal Day School and The Peninsula Regent, a retirement home.
After persistent comments from the community, the city established stricter guidelines for these facilities in November 2024, which included prohibiting placement within 300 feet from schools, residential units and other structures and zones. It made applying for small cell facility applications more restrictive, outlining limits on the height of small cell facilities, requiring shrouding and that all wiring be done underground. The new ordinance was modeled after the City of Encinitas, which adopted a similarly restrictive policy in 2019.
“One of the reasons we wanted to update the ordinance was because the original one was very long, very cumbersome, required a lot of steps and things could fall through the cracks,” said Lisa Diaz Nash, one of the San Mateo City Council members. “We’ve just introduced the ordinance, and since [then], there have been no new small cell tower applications … when you’re doing your cost-benefit analysis, it’s probably cheaper to go put in a small cell tower in San Carlos than in San Mateo.”
The aforementioned approved application for the cell facility from cell provider Crown Castle, though, was submitted before these new regulations had gone into effect, meaning one of the proposed locations was still near a school.
“This is a place where there are children who play from 7:30 a.m. until 3 p.m., pretty much every day,” said Quincey Grieves, Head of School at St. Matthew’s. “[It’s also] the sacred space of the church … The proximity of [the cell tower] was concerning, and there was another option that would be a greater distance from the school.”
San Mateo City Hall held a public hearing on March 12 to hear appeals from residents, resulting in the Sustainably and Infrastructure Commission voting 4-1 to reject the application. This decision was based on the contention that the proposed location was not the “least obtrusive” possible, as mandated by the San Mateo Design Standards. Levels of obtrusion can be assessed based on appearance, size and location.
The permit was changed so the cell facility would instead be built across the street from St. Matthews and closer to more businesses. However, permits that had been submitted prior to the guideline change remained judged by the older, less strict guidelines.
“There were several applications that had come in just before the new ordinance was passed, and the community was really irked by that,” Nash said. “They said, ‘Oh, they just shoved them all [at] the end, under the wire.’ Yeah, if they were a good business, that’s what they would do if they thought the new ordinance was stricter than the old one, so they did totally their prerogative. That’s when the appeals started happening.”
One of these applications was for a cell tower to be installed at 721 Edgewood Road, which Crown Castle had submitted in October 2024. When the appeal hearing was held on March 26, the Commission voted 4-0 to deny the appeal and uphold the application, based on the grounds that it complied with the original ordinance.
The City of San Mateo is subject to federal law, which prevents the city from regulating small cell facilities on the basis of the radio emissions that they emit. However, the city does have the power to regulate “the time, place, manner and aesthetics of small cells.”
Although the aesthetics of these cell tower installations were the only aspect that opponents could contest, the primary concerns stemmed from potential associated health risks.
“We [have] a neurosurgeon in our group who said, ‘I work with patients with glioblastomas, and this radiation is, in fact, linked to brain tumors, especially the malignant kind and a host of other non-cancer illnesses and ailments,’” Mavridis said. “However, the science is inconclusive about the health effects of high-frequency radio waves.”
The Federal Communications Commission controls guidelines that dictate the safety of cell towers and other cell facilities. It’s these guidelines that prohibit state and local governments, like San Mateo, from controlling the permitting of cell facilities based on health risks.
In 2021, the Environmental Health Trust, an organization that argues that 5G is harmful to people’s health, challenged the FCC over its 1996 guidelines for radiofrequency exposure. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals found that the FCC did not have sufficient evidence backing up its guidelines.
As of right now, there is no coalition of experts actively speaking out against the FCC’s radiation standards, but as the D.C. Court of Appeals writes, “the silence of other expert agencies, however, does not constitute a reasoned explanation” to disregard the EHT’s concerns.
