The FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau has cleared the way for Harmoni Towers to build a 260-foot cell tower in Montana’s Swan Valley, ruling against a group of local residents who argued the site would harm nesting eagles and other wildlife. The August 20 decision does more than resolve one tower fight — it puts the Commission on record stating, more explicitly than it has before, that its RF exposure limits protect humans only, not animals, insects or the environment.
The proposed site sits near Condon, Montana, in a stretch of the Swan Valley residents describe as prized wilderness. Opponents, organized as the nonprofit Stewards of the Swan Valley and represented by attorney W. Scott McCollough of Children’s Health Defense’s Electromagnetic Radiation & Wireless program, argued that Harmoni Towers’ environmental assessment was inadequate — that it contained errors, overlooked evidence of eagles nesting less than half a mile from the proposed site, and failed to account for potential impacts on mammals, birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles and plant life in the area.
The Wireless Telecommunications Bureau didn’t dispute those factual claims so much as rule them irrelevant. According to the decision, Harmoni’s assessment wasn’t required to evaluate effects on non-human species in the first place, because the Commission’s RF exposure rules pertain only to what the agency calls “the human environment.” The Bureau concluded that “the tower will not have a significant impact on the quality of the human environment” and let the project proceed without further review.
A distinction the FCC has now stated outright
McCollough told The Defender, which first reported the decision, that the underlying legal position isn’t new — but that the FCC explicitly confirming it is notable. “That’s been clear, but they’ve danced around it forever,” he said, adding that the agency has now stated plainly what industry and opponents alike have long understood: there is nothing in current FCC RF radiation regulations that protects animals, insects or plants from radiofrequency exposure, however that exposure might be characterized.
For towercos, that distinction functions as a bright line rather than a loophole. Environmental assessments required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for wireless facilities — which the FCC treats as major federal actions subject to review because the agency licenses and permits their construction — have a defined scope. This decision reinforces that wildlife-impact claims tied to RF emissions specifically, as opposed to physical construction impacts like habitat disturbance, viewshed effects, or ground disturbance, fall outside what an applicant is obligated to study.
The residents have 30 days from the decision to petition for reconsideration before it becomes final. McCollough said they’re weighing next steps.
Part of a broader deregulatory push on tower siting review
The Condon decision lands amid a wider FCC effort to narrow environmental review obligations for wireless infrastructure generally. In August 2025, the Commission proposed rule changes to “streamline” and “modernize” its NEPA review process, changes that would exempt a larger share of wireless projects from environmental review requirements entirely. For builders and site developers, a narrower review scope generally translates to fewer opportunities for third-party objections to slow down permitting — the same dynamic playing out in the Condon case, where the Bureau’s categorical answer on RF-and-wildlife claims removes an entire category of argument that opposition groups have used to contest tower siting decisions.
Children’s Health Defense is pursuing a separate, broader legal track aimed at the same underlying question. The group’s “704NoMore” initiative is raising funds to challenge Section 704 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the provision that bars state and local governments from considering RF radiation health effects when deciding whether to approve tower siting. CHD also has a pending federal case, filed in May, seeking to force the FCC to comply with a 2021 D.C. Circuit ruling that found the Commission had failed to adequately respond to record evidence of potential environmental harms from RF exposure when it last reviewed its exposure limits.
None of that changes the immediate outcome in Condon. But it means the legal and procedural questions raised there — what an environmental assessment must cover, and who bears the burden of showing harm — are very much live elsewhere, in litigation that could eventually reach beyond this single 260-foot tower.
