At least two Peachtree City Council members don't want to aim a proposed ordinance at children's treehouses, though they would like to shoot down television antennas clamped to treetops in the city.

At last week's council meeting, development services director Jim Williams said the staff had drafted an ordinance with proposed regulations for "tree structures." The ordinance would primarily address antennas needed for BellSouth's "wireless cable" service, a television reception system using direct-line technology from a tower, to a reception antenna on the subscriber's property, and then by wire into the house, Williams said.

Council member Robert Brooks said he didn't think the city would want to wind up in a position of regulating or preventing children from having a "tree fort" in their yard. He said he would like to "hear both sides" of the TV-antenna question to determine whether the receivers need to be in trees rather than on roofs or poles and whether there might be "more ingenious ways" to hide the antennas than in the trees.

"I realize this is just an emotional comment," Brooks said.

Council member Carol Fritz said later that the ordinance should not include treehouses, in her opinion, "mostly the antennas."

Williams said that city building inspectors had recently found "a lot of different things" nailed into trees. Some have not been "of the best construction," he said, but the building department had succeeded in getting the "more flimsy" structures repaired or taken down..

He said that the most recent discovery "to our horror" was that the metal-poled antennas were being installed atop trees, which he described as "an unnatural use of trees." As near as can be determined, he added, the service has about 1,000 subscribers in Peachtree City.

Contact with BellSouth yielded no willingness to alter the antenna arrangement, he said, noting that the utility claimed it had Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval to locate antennas on private property. The city attorney then advised drawing an ordinance that would address safety factors of all tree structures, outlining the reasons for regulation, giving violators 90 days to correct the situation, and setting out penalties.

"I don't think anybody envisioned putting antennas in trees," said City Manager Jim Basinger, commenting on FCC rules that prevent cities from trying to exclude antennas.