news story / By Hank Sims

Poor Reception

Cell phone industry lawsuit puts skids on proposed Arcata radiation labeling ordinance

(July 29, 2010)  “Ideally, this type of legislation would not be something that local government would pass,” said Councilmember Shane Brinton during the Arcata City Council’s regular meeting last Tuesday, as he pushed his fellow members to consider an ordinance that would require cell phone merchants to label the radiation output of their product.

“This sort of labeling law, in my opinion, really should be the responsibility of the state and federal government. However the cell phone lobby is very strong, and certainly just as with the tobacco industry or any other industry, until the science is absolutely definitive you better believe they are going to be protecting their interests.”

Three days later, the industry did just that, filing a lawsuit seeking to overturn the San Francisco ordinance that Brinton and his council colleagues had voted unanimously to emulate.

Last month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved its “Cell Phone Right-to-Know Ordinance,” which directed all stores selling cellular phones within the city limits to publicly post the radiation levels of each model on offer. These radiation levels, measured in units of Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) — the amount of radiation, in watts, absorbed by an average kilogram of head-flesh during use — are already widely known, as the Federal Communications Commission tests all new models before approving them for sale. New phones must have an SAR of less than 1.6 watts per kilogram before the FCC will consider them safe. San Francisco’s ordinance merely required that stores offer this information to customers while they are shopping.

In its lawsuit, though, the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), an industry group representing phone manufacturers, charges that San Francisco — and, by extension, any local government — has no standing to force vendors to disclose that information at the point of sale. The CTIA maintains that the industry is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission only, and that any additional local regulations — even modest ones, such as mandatory disclosure of known facts — are unlawful intrusions upon the FCC’s authority.

Such an outcome was considered at last Tuesday’s Arcata City Council meeting, where the council voted 4-0 to direct City Attorney Nancy Diamond to draw up an ordinance similar to San Francisco’s that Arcata might consider at a future date. (Councilmember Mark Wheetley was absent.) Brinton noted that the CTIA had recently sent a notice to Arcata, and possibly to other cities as well, threatening legal action if any of them were to follow in San Francisco’s footsteps. But there was broad agreement that this was mere saber-rattling, at least in the current instance. For one, the industry hadn’t yet filed suit against San Francisco. For another, with that action Arcata was merely researching a possible ordinance, not enacting one. Finally, though, council members just couldn’t understand what the big deal was.

“We’re just talking about people having a deeper understanding of a tool they’re using, and a little more information about it,” said Councilmember Susan Ornelas. “I don’t see how that’s a problem. It doesn’t fly in the face of the FCC — it’s just information.”

With that in mind, the council decided to move ahead based, in part, on the testimony of people like resident Lisa Brown, co-owner of Solutions, a store offering nontoxic alternatives to common household products. Brown noted that more and more children are using cell phones more and more often, and that parents are not aware that there is such a wide disparity in the amount of radiation emitted by various models.

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