Friends of Morongo Valley non-profit tower opposition group discuss federal litigation in response to BLM approval
Last week the Bureau of Land Management approved the construction of a controversial telecommunications tower in Morongo Valley after nearly four years of community pushback. The local group Residents Against the Tower (RATT) has recently acquired non-profit status and have renamed themselves Friends of Morongo Valley, and they held their first community meeting over the weekend to discuss next steps, including fundraising to hire an attorney for federal litigation. Reporter Gabriel Hart was in attendance and has this recap.
Friends of Morongo Valley President Sara Fernandez and Secretary/Treasurer Kimberly Keilbach spoke to a packed house in Covington Park on Saturday, May 30 where they laid out their plan to fight the Interconnect Towers LLC telecommunications tower in the final thirty days since BLM approved the project.. To bring attendees up to speed, Fernadez and Keilbach gave a brief history of the opposition. In 2022, BLM first notified the public of their intention to downgrade viewshed protections for the 196-foot tower, and the public responded with 180 letters raising environmental and safety concerns. In 2024, BLM released their Environmental Assessment, to which the public responded with 1,042 substantive comments plus a 30-page attorney letter to express unresolved concerns. Last February, BLM moved the tower site 800-feet and released a final EA, to which the community submitted fifty-seven letters of protest, including a 60-page legal protest, economic study, historic nomination, expert wildfire report, and radio frequency expert report.
While the BLM has approved the tower as of last week, there is a 30-day appeal window. Friends of Morongo Valley now aim to file a Notice of Appeal to the Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLA), petition for a stay to halt project construction during appeal, file a Federal Complaint in Central District Court, then file an Injunction to maintain status quo during the lawsuit. Friends of Morongo Valley said “we’ve spoken with dozens of attorneys and environmental groups who’ve indicated that we’ve got a reasonable chance of prevailing in court.” The non-profit must now fundraise an estimate of $100,000 to litigate and have already raised $73,000.
While BLM’s press release states their “approval advances efforts to modernize telecommunications infrastructure for nearby communities,” Fernadez said there’s already the Middle Mile Network initiative near completion that would render this angle superfluous.
“Granted, there are dead zones up the Morongo grade, but currently the state of California has this whole initiative called the Middle Mile Network and what Caltrans is doing along state highways throughout the state of California is installing infrastructure to existing utility poles where new fiber optic cables being installed with electronics and basically the infrastructure needed so that carriers like AT&T, Verizon, etc, can easily connect and add small cell transponders for 5G and whatnot, without having to build a whole new tower. I was corresponding with Caltrans just last week and they gave me an update that they intended to be ready to connect by the end of 2026. The fiberoptic up the Morongo grade to our town will be installed and carriers will be able to apply to locate on those utility poles, just like a carrier would approach Interconnect and ask to be located on this tower,” said Fernandez.
Keilbach added that the comments they’ve received from environmental groups for Morongo Valley residents thus far have been especially encouraging.
“We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from environmental organizations saying, ‘this is fantastic,’ that they’ve ‘never seen the community come together like this,’ that ‘this is amazing,’ and it’s really worth noting that the longer we can delay the better our chances of this entire project being redundant and unprofitable to build,” said Keilbach.
In the meeting’s handout, Friends of Morongo Valley state that “Interconnect Towers LLC is counting on our community to give up and not challenge this approval. But we believe they have underestimated us–our community defeated Green Path North in 2010, and then went on to help establish the Sand to Snow National Monument in 2016.”
