Unexpected community response leads to discussion on improved environmental remediation

The July 9, 2024 meeting of the Port of Seattle Commission marked a small but potentially meaningful victory for the Des Moines community.

Item 8d Des Moines Creek West Tract C on their consent agenda was to sign off on the sale of the last small sliver of land along 216th Street. Consent agenda items are considered so routine that they are voted on as a group with no discussion. So  the Commission, staff, and developer Panattoni (who only appeared to provide a courtesy 'thank you') must have been surprised to see so many public comments and letters against such a relatively tiny item on their agenda.

So in a fairly unusual move, the Commission pulled the item and engaged in a lengthy discussion which took the lion's share of the meeting.

Background

The area in question is one part of a plan to extend the Des Moines Creek Business Park, a swath of land owned by the Port of Seattle with a very long history. The portion known as Phases I-IV, are dominated by the FAA building. That land, was purchased for the Port with FAA funds to buy out noise impacted residents. The FAA specified that such lands could provide some form of 'community benefit', which you can see in similar property buyouts at North Sea-Tac Park. But for the south end, the Des Moines Creek Business Park concept was created to provide community benefit through economic development.

A sliver of Phase V

However, the purchase under discussion Tuesday is actually a sliver of what used to be WSDOT land to the immediate west of Phases I-IV. Having lain fallow for many years, residents have come to think of it as an undeveloped path into the Des Moines Creek Trail. But the area was originally meant as the path for SR-509. When WSDOT decided on another path for SR-509 it offered this now-surplus property for sale. At the north end  the City of SeaTac bought their piece to extend the Des Moines Creek trail on 200th St. At the south end, the City Of Des Moines opted to let the Port of Seattle purchase the land in sections to continue extending the Des Moines Creek Business Park westward along 216th St. This new 15 acre project is known as Phase V of Des Moines Creek Business Park or just Des Moines Creek West.

[caption id="attachment_21475" align="alignnone" width="1706"] Tract C: the Private Road was the last sliver of land purchased to begin development of Phase V: Des Moines Creek West[/caption]

What confused almost everyone in the room (but for very different reasons) is that the Port had already bought most of Phase V except for that tiny sliver known as Tract C. Every phase of the Des Moines Creek Business Park, up to and including this latest decision has come with the strong support of the City of Des Moines, including both the current and previous Mayors.

Mayor Matt Mahoney and Deputy Mayor Traci Buxton testify at the July 12, 2022 Port of Seattle Commission in support of Des Moines Creek Business Park West

Failure to communicate

Residents have been seeing the Panattoni signs up for several years. But they clearly had no idea what it might mean for them until the required 30 day public notice sign appeared last week. In other words, it took this tiny sliver of land to trigger public awareness of a project that is shovel-ready.

But on the other hand, neither the Port Commission or Panattoni had any way of knowing that this was the first that residents had heard about the project.

Trickle Down Economics

The entire Des Moines Creek Business Park is tax-exempt and provides almost no revenue for the City. Phases I-IV create over eight million dollars a year in revenue for the Port of Seattle and projections for Phase V are similarly good--for the Port of Seattle.

For twenty years  the City of Des Moines promoted this approach describing almost literally as trickle-down economics. The vision was to have an industrial park at the top of the hill filled with thousands of employees who would in turn become customers for businesses at the bottom. Obviously none of that happened.

Equity Lens

The term 'equity' is often associated with identity politics. But according to the Port's development guidelines, 'equity' means consideration of benefits for the immediate area--both economic and environmental. That did not happen in the Des Moines Creek Business Park.

Cities like Des Moines and the Port of Seattle need to communicate these projects more fairly to the public and allow them to engage in a more meaningful way. They also need to ensure that every project  around the airport is not only less harmful but actually provides measurable benefits for those immediate areas. It doesn’t matter how much money the project makes if almost none of it stays in the community. It doesn’t matter how many jobs a project creates if they aren’t for people living in that community. And it's an insult to the community if such projects leave the local environment worse.

That is the real equity test: are these projects beneficial to people living under the flight path, not just today with one-time construction money, but five, ten and twenty years down the road.

Now What?

The item was ultimately approved--which was the only possible outcome. As Commissioner Felleman pointed out, this project had been given so much support from the City of Des Moines over such a long period, it would not have been reasonable to relitigate the entire project over this one small strip of land. But to her credit, Commissioner Hasegawa asked Port staff to go back to both the City of Des Moines and Panattoni to see if the project could be held to the same standard as their own Land Stewardship Plan. The LSP are the Port's standards for land development around the airfield, providing for significant improvements over typical City requirements on environmental sustainability.

Theoretically, Phase V could be stopped. But at some point, the area will be developed. The question is: will it be done in a responsible manner? If the current Phase V does proceed, and if it could be built in the spirit of the developer's brochure, that could also be a win for the community. But those are big 'ifs' given how Phases I-IV were executed, with vast swaths of asphalt, and massive loss of trees and habitat. We hope the developer (and the City) are self-aware and sensitive enough to recognize this. Regardless, we believe residents are right to be skeptical and need to get organized.

Action Items

Anything to do with land use is complex and this is no exception. The entire Phase V project LUA2022-0044 has already received a Determination of Non-Significance  from the City's SEPA official. As we see it, concerned parties have three action items:

• Read the SEPA Checklist carefully and provide comments to the City of Des Moines by July 23, 2024.
  • You can disagree with the responses to the checklist. Often there will be answers that list environmental concerns but seek to under-value or even negate their impact.
  • You can ask that new items be studied which you feel were ignored.
• You can also write an appeal of the entire process and deliver it in writing to the City of Des Moines by August 2, 2024. In this case, the City applied the least strict form of environmental review.
• After that, the application will be reviewed by the City's Hearing Examiner, not the City Council, unless the public can provide strong evidence that the process has not been administered correctly.

Changing the noise discussion from personal opinion to public health

Annoyance, is the term of art describing  a level of unwanted and/or harmful sound that is not damaging to hearing. That is how it was first used in research literature. We think it's time to come up with a new term because 'annoyance' is dismissive of the impacts that aviation noise has on public health. And public health is how we now need to think about noise.

For a very long time, researchers understood that chronic noise exposure could have detrimental effects (particularly for childhood learning). But it was not until the 1970s--and in large part because of the Sea-Tac Communities Plan of 1976--that the FAA started taking the community impacts of aviation noise seriously.

In 1979, Congress passed  The Aviation Safety and Noise Abatement Act (ASNA), the first of several laws establishing Noise Exposure Maps, Sound Insulation, the whole shebang now known as Part 150.

ASNA also established the use of a very medical sounding methodology to evaluate people's reactions to noise called dose-response. In this case, the dose is the noise and the response is the percentage of people considered 'highly annoyed'. Now if 'annoyance' sounds more like psychology than physiology you're not wrong. We'll get to that.

The noise is measured via DNL, a complicated unit of measurement that sounds like a 'decibel' but is not really. It's more like an average meant to factor in several other factors including the type of aircraft and the time of day (night time flights being disruptive of sleep.) But to give you a sense of how complicated it can get, one extremely loud overflight at 2:30am in a 24 hour period could mark your home as DNL65. Or ten flights. Or 100 flights. Or several hundred. It just depends.

Whether or not you agree with that methodology, this research was summarized by the Schultz Curve. As you can see, 20% of the public were found to be 'highly annoyed' at that DNL65. The 'dose' (DNL65), at a 'response' rate of 20%, became the dividing line between homes that are eligible for sound insulation grants and those that are not.

Annoyance vs. Health

Important: there is nothing in Part 150 addressing health impacts. It is 100% focused on annoyance, which is, again, a matter of opinion.That approach may have been more understandable in 1979 when research into the physiological impacts of aviation noise were still in their infancy. But forty years on, in addition to learning problems for children, the impacts to sleep, stress, hypertension, diabetes and other cardiovascular diseases from aviation are better understood. And they are profound.

(One problem is that most previous research had been done on traffic, which is a more continuous sound, than airplanes which are isolated events. It turns out that physiologically, humans respond far differently to each type of annoyance.)

Hush Money

DNL65 and 20% may seem arbitrary choices for establishing who gets sound insulation and who does not. But as a practical matter that was partly because that was the amount of sound insulation FAA was able to pay for.

This is important: the FAA only gets a certain amount of total funding every five years from Congress in the FAA Reauthorization Act. Back in 1979, somewhere, someone at the FAA, set that initial DNL65 to balance the amount of money available for sound insulation with other priorities such as safety, construction projects, etc.

Local context: The FAA gave the Port of Seattle $300,000,000 in grants to provide roughly 9,400 Port Packages around Sea-Tac Airport.

Sound insulation is usually considered the least efficient form of noise mitigation. Generally, it is far less expensive to attempt to reduce the source of the noise. So in addition to providing funds for sound insulation, the FAA also has heavily funded voluntary industry efforts to develop quieter aircraft. To a certain extent the industry has succeeded. Newer aircraft really are quieter.

However, there is only so much that can be done to reduce the noise profile of any 400,000 lb. object flying overhead at 250mph. One can make an aircraft measurably 'quieter' on takeoff, but barely move the needle as to the annoyance for people under the flight path. Why? Most of those improvements are engine-related. It turns out that as much as 90% of the noise, except during takeoff, comes from the airframe alone.

Thus, the FAA has completely exaggerated those improvements for the community.

How exaggerated? The FAA would claim that today only 400,000 people in the entire United States are now heavily impacted by aviation noise.

[caption id="attachment_21153" align="alignnone" width="816"] Change in DNL65 from 1991 to 2013. According to the FAA, the shrinking boundary means an 85% reduction in the number of people subject to aviation noise impacts[/caption]

Local context: The FAA would say that, of the 67,000 residents who were heavily impacted by aviation noise in 1991, only 9,700 are as impacted today-- due to newer, quieter airplanes. An 85% improvement!

Which is ridiculous. But also happens to almost match the claimed reduction in noise of modern airplanes like the 787. What a coincidence.

A new survey, a new curve

But the FAA has continued to work the issue from the community point of view. In 2021, they conducted a Neighborhood Environmental Survey of 10,000 residents at the 20 largest airports--the first since 1979. The Technical Analysis resulted in a new curve; the National Curve.

• On the plus side, the National Curve now confirms what European and United Nations researchers have been saying for years: the percentage of highly annoyed people living under the flight path is three times ¹higher.
• On the other hand, as we just saw, the regulation governing sound insulation funding still only applies to the DNL65, and thus only one third the homes.

Public Health vs. Personal Preference

Our view is that whether people find airplanes 'annoying' is irrelevant and we challenge the entire survey. Rather than move the discussion from sociology to public health they fell back on the forty year old concept of annoyance, which is, again, highly personal--and notably, not subject to regulation.

Many people will honestly respond to a noise survey saying they enjoy the sound of commercial aircraft--even though chronic exposure to noise is bad for learning outcomes and cardiovascular health, especially for the elderly. Health impacts have nothing to do with annoyance.

So despite all the trappings of public health (eg. dose-response), annoyance is a matter of opinion and thus not subject to regulatory authority.

And that is why the FAA and the industry want to engage the issue in those terms. It's a distraction.

No matter how annoying we find the noise, at some point, we must stop fighting 'Annoyance'. It is the subjective nature of annoyance which makes it impossible to move to regulatory authority.

It is unacceptable that the FAA has responded to the DNL65 with yet another meaningless survey, but it's even worse if we continue playing their game--which has no possibility of improving our situation.

Ultimately, this issue will be addressed much like secondhand smoke and drunk driving--an issue of public health rather than personal preference.

Today, no one says, "Don't like my smoking? Move!" At a certain point, we win by making clear that this is a matter of public health, not a question of annoyance.

There is always someone else to blame

The original DNL65 boundary, which provided 9,400 Port Packages, today would only cover a third of those homes given the current DNL65----because 'the airplanes are so much quieter!' But using the new NES, the number of homes eligible for sound insulation would triple.

The difference? The DNL65 is what Congress will fund. The NES they will not. There is always someone else to blame.

Now what?

Congress

Washington State has some of the most powerful Federal electeds in commercial aviation. Senator Maria Cantwell is Chair of the committee responsible for the FAA. Representative Rick Larsen is ranking member of the House Transportation Committee. Neither put forward no amendments to fund more sound insulation or other meaningful mitigations in the 2024 FAA Reauthorization bill. To be fair, it is doubtful that there is more than a quarter of the membership of either body willing to vote for such funding. But given their influence, we think they should at least try. The next FAA Reauthorization is not until 2028, but all your electeds are up for re-election before then.

The Port of Seattle

There is also the Port of Seattle. There is nothing in Part 150 that prevents the airport itself from spending its own money on mitigations like sound insulation.

And the Port of Seattle continues to break records, and thus can write a check every second Tuesday of the month.

¹The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has undertaken a multi-year research effort to quantify the impacts of aircraft noise exposure on communities around commercial service airports in the United States (US). The goal of this research effort was to develop an updated and nationally representative civil aircraft dose-response curve, quantifying the relationship between aircraft noise exposure and community annoyance. To characterize this relationship, the research team designed and conducted the Neighborhood Environmental Survey (NES), which collected information from a statistically representative number of adult residents living around a balanced sample of 20 US. Airports — objectively chosen to reflect the nation as a whole. From the survey data, a national dose-response curve was derived that describes the relationship between aircraft noise exposure [in terms of DayNight Average Sound Level (DNL)] and the percentage of individuals reported as being highly annoyed by aircraft noise. Aircraft noise exposure levels were modeled using the FAA Integrated Noise Model (INM), version 7.0d; based on 12-month sets of aircraft flight tracking data collected between 2012 and 2014 for each NES airport. Community response data was collected through a mail survey questionnaire, designed to follow the recommendations of the International Commission on the Biological Effects of Noise (ICBEN) (Fields et al. 2001), requesting respondents to rank on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 5 being most): “Thinking about the last 12 months or so, when you are here at home, how much does [noise from aircraft] bother, disturb or annoy you?” Responses of either 4 or 5 where then considered as “highly annoyed.” Just over 10,000 people completed and returned the mail questionnaire (resulting in a response rate of 40 percent); administered in six separate “waves” over a 12-month period beginning in October 2015. Logistic regression analysis of the “highly-annoyed” responses from the mail questionnaire and their associated aircraft noise exposure levels were used to generate the national doseresponse curve. The percentage of those surveyed who were highly annoyed by aircraft noise increased monotonically with increasing noise exposure. In comparison to prior studies on this topic, the NES’s national curve shows substantially more people highly annoyed for a given DNL aircraft noise exposure level.