7-0 vote brings the Port Package Update bill within only a few steps of becoming law.
At today’s Executive Session the House Local Government Committee voted unanimously to pass E2SB5955, with no amendments. It is now in the hands of the Capital Budget Committee. We want to thank everyone who helped move the bill moved forward by signing in Pro and writing letters.
We have no Action Items today. But we wanted to explain some of the work we do and provide a status report. Following yesterday’s public hearing (but before today’s vote), we sent the following letter to Committee members:
Chair Duerr and Members of the Committee,
Following up on my testimony today re. SB5955 (Port Package updates).
We wanted to provide a couple of (small) clarifications to the comments we heard during the hearing which we believe are salient.
Problem Scope
Sea-Tac Noise.Info, has been building a list of homes with Port Package Problems since 2017. We did no advertising or active outreach. We simply put up a passive web form where people could contact us with their issues. When people contacted us, we verified that they had received a Port Package and tallied the costs, contractors, permits and invoices paid from publicly available documents. Ourat list currently contains over 1,300 homes. That represents almost 14% of the 9,500 total installs.
Of those, we’ve conducted almost 350 in-home site inspections. And we get more almost every week (I’m doing another site visit myself this Friday.)
It isn’t hard to guess from these anecdotes what an active and rigorous assessment will find.
Demography
The majority of current homeowners with Port Package Problems are not elderly. A far more ‘typical’ Port Package homeowner would be 40, BIPOC, with school-age children. This is because they are the second or third homeowner since the original system was installed and those are the demographic trends of Burien, Des Moines and SeaTac. Families move near the airport for the last bit of middle-income housing in King County.
Wear and Tear?
One person mentioned they’d had to replace their windows twice. That is unfortunate. And also extremely unusual for a good Port Package. In fact, the sound insulation systems the Port got right (and definitely the new systems they install today), typically perform well after many decades. If there were problems, it was not due to ‘normal wear and tear’.
Causes
We try to avoid blame and shame. However, in 1996 the PSRC required the Port to install all those sound insulation systems before being given funding to build the Third Runway. The extreme sense of urgency led to a unique combination of poor HVAC design, poor materials, poor installs and poor oversight. That is was created the unique situation to be addressed by SB5955. And that is why now the Port does such a good job and why the new systems last. Put simply: they learned from their mistakes.
The Airport has been here since the 30’s!
Sea-Tac Airport was officially opened in 1949, but did not become a major player in international commercial aviation until almost the 2000’s. But that is entirely beside the point. All arguments against airport community mitigation tend to boil down to some form of ‘personal responsibility’. “People knew what they were getting themselves into. Don’t like it? Move!” To which we reply, “Move where?” The fact is that people do live and will continue to live near the airport and so long as it is legal to do so, must be able to do so with a baseline of comfort, health and safety.
Middle-Housing is Fairness and Justice
Everyone struggles so hard to building any new housing in WA. We would argue that protecting this essential housing stock for this group of homeowners is essential to maintaining our communities. In that light SB5955 seems only prudent, especially when each fix will likely serve many families for many decades to come.
It is also fair and just, given the billions of dollars in annual economic benefit Sea-Tac Airport provides the State of Washington, that the State help create a solution for the people under the flight path–people who traded 1,000 flights a day over their heads for a sound insulation system that does not work as intended.
Sincerely,
JC Harris
on behalf of Sea-Tac Noise.Info
Why it’s so hard
We’re publishing this letter to help explain why it’s so hard to get this done and why we adopt the strategies we do. The topic and history of Port Package updates is terribly complex. It often takes several minutes to explain what a ‘sound insulation system’ is to people who do not live here, let alone why this is even a ‘problem’. Plus, there is a ton of blame to go around.
The workload for State electeds is incredible. Law makers rarely have time to read anything longer than a few hundred words. If you can’t condense your idea down to an ‘elevator pitch’, either your idea does not pass or it gets condensed for you. And if you explain that the root causes of Port Package problems come down to poor oversight, decision makers are more than happy to say, “Then why aren’t you going after them for the money?”. Especially when there are so many other easier (and easier to understand) ways to spend State money.
All of which is to say this: the current (fifth) version of the bill is pretty much what we expected. No more. No less.
Status Report
While we’re waiting for next steps, a quick summary on where SB5955 stands…
SB5955 began about 45 days ago as thirteen page wish-list of airport community concerns. It has been whittled down to half that size and now contains only one single goal,
The bill is now simply an open-ended five year grant program, administered by the Department of Commerce, to fund the repair of bad Port Packages. Funding may come from a variety of State, County and Port resources. The State will monitor the Port’s progress in updating/repairing homes annually. And at the end of five years, the State audit committee will evaluate how well the program worked. Sounds great. However: there is no actual funding. If funding emerges it will be some last minute negotation.
- We like the accountability piece–something that was obviously lacking in the original Port Package program. It provides a yardstick and a goal for all stakeholders to create a good program and to keep it going beyond five years.
- We’re also not overly anxious about the current absence of funding. First of all, the bill is currently in the Capital Budget Committee, which may provide immediate funding opportunities. But if not, both the State and the Port seem to have accepted that there are problems, a sense of acceptance that literally did not exist even three months ago. If both the State and the Port have acknowledged a willingness to work the problems, and there is a place to put money, we think we can keep going to the State and the Port until we get the dollars.
The trick now is to keep this momentum going. Every day someone, even our best friends, gets at least one fact wrong about airport communities. We have to educate, educate, and keep on educating until the issues become clear and raise the expectations to where they always should have been. Paying for Port Package updates must become something that both the Port and all agencies will be expected to do from now on.