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Plans to install at least 40 cell-phone antennas in the Foothills have riled residents in one upscale neighborhood and prompted county officials to look at ways to tighten ordinances for wireless towers and antennas.

Residents of the Shadow Hills neighborhood, near north First Avenue and East River Road, have been up in arms since they learned in the last few weeks that San Jose, Calif.-based NextG Networks plans to install a number of antennas in the area.

Most of those antennas would be attached to existing utility poles, but there would also be two new poles in the Shadow Hills neighborhood, which has all of its utilities underground. The residents have several concerns, ranging from property values and aesthetics to health effects and construction noise.

Pick your reason, but residents don't want the antenna poles near their backyards.

"Our neighborhood was established 30 years ago with a plan to have all utilities underground, and they are all underground for aesthetic reasons," said Ted Schmidt, an attorney who lives in Shadow Hills. "We want to preserve the mountain views and the beauty of our neighborhood."

At the request of Pima County Supervisor Ann Day, NextG has temporarily halted the work to address issues with residents, but a company spokesman said the delay is just a formality.

"It was only on hold as an agreement, a temporary agreement with the county" in order to meet with residents, said Robert Delsman, vice president of government relations and regulatory affairs for NextG. "Our business model is predicated on installations."

NextG is what's known in the wireless world as a gap provider. That means the company fills in dead zones for wireless providers, improving cell-phone signals. Because of the area's rocky, mountainous terrain, the Foothills area is full of dead zones.

Delsman wouldn't say what company NextG contracted with to put in the antennas, but he did say people who use Apple's iPhone will be very happy with the improved reception. AT&T is the wireless provider for the iPhone.

While many of the antennas will be attached to existing poles and utilities, Delsman said, the two new poles will be less than 30 feet tall, are safe and hardly stand out. And he described them as a necessary technology that will not only improve reception but provide capacity for all the non-talking things people now do on phones like searching the Internet, e-mailing photos and watching movies.

"We don't think they are bad-looking, and we try to make them blend in and be as unobtrusive as possible," he said.

Part of the problem may be NextG didn't do a great job of notifying residents about the project. Delsman said notices were published and there were public hearings that residents could have attended, but he also acknowledged there was no real outreach to the neighborhood.

That's how you get situations like the one that played out on Andy Tanzer's property, where a contractor for NextG was erroneously digging a hole on his land.

"They were using the side of my yard as a dumping ground," said Tanzer, whose home is next to where NextG wants to install one of its poles.

For at least several weeks Tanzer and other residents had noticed contractors installing fiber optics underground, but no one knew the work was for proposed cell-phone antennas. Tanzer said he only found out about it when he complained about the contractor digging on his property.

"The homeowners association didn't know anything about it," he said.

When residents realized what was going on a few weeks ago they began to bombard Day, their county supervisor, with phone calls and e-mails.

"Unfortunately, our code doesn't require a public hearing if the poles are under 34 feet," she said. "But it does require NextG to notify the public, and NextG did not do that. That's what I heard from all of the homeowners up in Shadow Hills."

Day requested that NextG halt work on the two antenna poles so the company and the neighborhood could work out a compromise, and that's where things stand.

Meanwhile she asked the county to look at modeling its ordinance for wireless communications after an ordinance in San Diego. That ordinance requires all poles be camouflaged in residential areas, sets height limits and allows zoning boards to reject applications if the poles do not fit with the surrounding neighborhoods.

County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry has sent a memo to county staffers to look into the San Diego ordinance.

"I definitely want to modify our code and strengthen our code as quickly as possible," Day said. "The problem I have with NextG is, they act like they can do anything they want to do, and they don't bother to notify homeowners."

Whether the poles get moved remains to be seen, though.

Both the company and the neighborhood say they are willing to negotiate and work things out, but there is one problem with those statements: the two antenna poles don't seem to be negotiable.

"The technology is available for them to deal with this problem without having to put towers and antennas in existing neighborhoods," said Schmidt, the attorney and resident.

But Delsman said the antennas are coming whether or not Shadow Hills residents like it.

"At this point, we are way too far down the road," he said.