A coalition of San Francisco citizens groups today sued the city over the 5-6 vote last month by the Board of Supervisors to allow AT&T to install 726 utility boxes on sidewalks throughout the city without studying the impact and alternatives with an environmental impact report.
The groups include San Francisco Beautiful (filing its first lawsuit against the city in its 64-year history), San Francisco Tomorrow, Dogpatch Neighborhood Association, Potrero Boosters, and the Duboce Triangle Neighborhood Association. Their appeal of AT&T’s permit was rejected by Sups. Sean Elsbernd, Mark Farrell, Malia Cohen, Carmen Chu, David Campos, and Scott Wiener, allowing the project to move forward.
“The city has refused to do what should be a routine environmental review,” Milo Hanke, a past president of San Francisco Beautiful, told us. He said the public should have been allowed to consider alternatives to the “unwanted and unwarranted degradation of the public sidewalks by a greedy corporation.”
While the project will allow AT&T to upgrade its Internet service and other capabilities, many in the technology community told us back in May that there are better options for improving the high-tech infrastructure in the city without the unsightly boxes that will block sidewalks and be magnets for graffiti.
But those groups, and the groups that filed this lawsuit, say they felt ignored by City Hall and AT&T. “We were shut out of the process,” Hanke said. Now, the plaintiffs will go to court to seek an injunction to stop the project as they wait for a ruling on the merits of the case.