This is a machine-generated transcript. There may be errors in spelling of both names and words. See here for meeting video and explainer.
SECTION 1:
[Mayor Matt Pina]: Said everybody turn the microphones on so you got a green light in front of you. This is the June 6, 2019 city council study session. I would ask council member Nutting to please lead us in the pledge of allegiance.
[Group recites Pledge of Allegiance]
[Mayor]: Please let the record show that all council members are present. Council, if I may, we have consultants here with us tonight and they have a hard stop at 9:00. This work study is for the purpose of us getting some information, so I am going to move straight into our discussion items, which is a little bit out of the ordinary for us. We only have two hours, and I want to make sure that we get our questions answered and get the communication flowing.
The first of the discussion items is START Committee. We have had a change there, so I’ll start with a motion to accept the resignation of START Committee Member Ken Rogers and to nominate Steve Edmundston as his replacement.
[Council Member Nutting]: I move.
[Mayor]: We have a motion made by Deputy Mayor Pennington, seconded by council member Bangs. Any discussion?
[Unidentified Voice]: You look a lot alike.
[Mayor]: Let me clarify – the motion was made by Deputy Mayor Pennington. You guys can arm wrestle over this later. I’m giving the second to council member Bangs.
[City Manager Matthias]: Thank you mayor. I’d just like to acknowledge the effort and work of Ken Rogers on behalf of the city on the START committee. He’s a valuable participant. He ran into a conflict with a local business called Quarter Deck – encourage everyone to go. We just wanted to thank Ken and at the same time acknowledge appreciation of all the effort that Steve has put into helping us move forward.
[Mayor]: Absolutely. And I think our typical protocol, we’ll draft a letter. All those in favor of Steve Edmondston joining our START committee please raise your right hand and say aye.
[Group]: Aye.
[Mayor]: Probably should have asked Steve, but since we didn’t – hey Steve, welcome aboard the committee.
SECTION 2:
[Michael Matthias]: Thank you mayor. This entire day, in fact portions of yesterday, we’ve had the opportunity to have some very dynamic conversations with our Aviation consultants. Let me provide a little bit of background. Our Consultants with us today are James Allardice, Jason Schwarz and Emily Transer, and they’re here to answer questions and present information.
Originally, the four cities – Des Moines, Burien, SeaTac, and ourselves – had come together and contracted with these consultants, each city making a financial commitment to the process. They would be available to help us in the environmental review of the Sustainable Airport Master Plan (SAMP). That initially involved helping us with the scoping efforts, which identify the elements needed to be included in environmental review, at least from our perspective.
The cities joined through their SeaTac officials – Susan Caesar’s here, she’s our city SeaTac official – and the other cities have their SeaTac officials. We came together with the officials and the consultants and made comments on the scoping and submitted those to the Port of Seattle. At the same time, the city made an individual letter identifying elements we were concerned about.
Now what’s happened is that we’re waiting for the Port to respond to the scoping letters and comments. Then they’re going forward with their environmental review of the SAMP process. Our consultants, working with our SeaTac officials, will next comment on those environmental documents for sufficiency in mitigating impacts from the proposed growth at SeaTac.
Along the way, we thought it would be helpful, given the city’s commitment, council’s commitment, the work of our Aviation Advisory Committee, and the work of staff, to engage the consultants for a day in Des Moines. We made it a full day – we started at 11, took a tour, had lunch, met with about 30 staff just to ensure that our staff understands the issues. We had some more meetings, had a senior staff meeting, had an aviation advisory committee meeting, and now we’re doing The Joint Council Aviation Advisory Committee.
Yesterday we had a meeting in Burien called by Brian, who’s here, of the four cities and the consultants just to discuss activities related to the interlocal agreement on the scoping and environmental review of the SAMP. That’s a separate contract. Now the city of Des Moines is engaged in a separate contract for today to have our consultants here to answer questions and help us with strategic planning. We’re very pleased they’ve been very resilient – hopefully they can last through one more session.
What I’d like to do is acknowledge each member of our Aviation Advisory Committee to identify themselves.
[Members identify themselves: Dave, Sheila Brush, Steve Edmondston, and Mark Proulx on the phone]
SECTION 3:
[Michael Matthias]: Those are some of our activities to date. What we want to do is open it up, and maybe what might be helpful – calling on you guys without telling you – is just talk a little about what your experience has been here, what you’ve seen in the city, and some of the ideas perhaps that we’ve discussed. Then we’ll open it up to the council and Aviation Advisory Committee.
[Emily Transer]: First of all, thank you so much for having us here. Jim’s going to set something up that I think will be useful and interesting. I’m Emily Transer, and my experience professionally has been engaging with cities who are airport adjacent for the last 12 years. That’s been one of my major focuses. One of the most heartening things I’ve seen today and through working with you, your city, and the other three cities is the willingness and level of engagement from the cities themselves – not just the residents but from elected officials and city officials.
A couple of things that just struck me as really encouraging: this is a very complex issue and it can be fraught with confusion or emotion when dealing with airport noise and airport impacts. Coming to the decision to really put resources behind addressing them is a really great first step. I’ve seen successes across the country, and I’ve seen fits and starts. I think that if you really have a plan of action, there can be some really meaningful tools implemented that will help with advocating to the airport for meaningful solutions that actually will help your residents, both from an environmental standpoint and from just a noise standpoint. That level of engagement is really encouraging.
[Jason]: Well, Jim sets up, I guess I would just say that really our philosophy as a team is to make sure that communities are well represented and have that technical background and support to help them in these arenas. That will kind of tee off what my more technical colleague has to share with you.
[Jim Allardice]: Thank you Emily. My name’s Jim Allardice. My background is air traffic control. I started out in 1980, joined the Air Force, went to Del Rio Texas Laughlin Air Force base for a few years, then went up to Grissom Air Force Base in Indiana. I got into the FAA in November 1983, worked at New Orleans International Airport, Lansing Capital City Airport, and in January 1991 I went to Atlanta Hartsfield. I’ve been there ever since until I retired in November 2014 from the FAA. The last 10 years of my tenure at Atlanta, I was a support specialist in charge of implementation of NextGen. One of the things that entailed was airspace and procedure design. I designed all the RNAV infrastructure for Atlanta.
SECTION 4:
[Jim Allardice]: We use software called TARGETS – it’s something that the FAA has been using for several years. It’s been modified and upgraded repeatedly, but basically it’s a design tool that allows us to make sure that all the procedures pass FAA criteria and that we’re getting the most efficient use of airspace possible.
What I’m going to do tonight is relay to you how that process works a little bit. When I was with the FAA in Atlanta, I was able to work collaboratively with the communities surrounding the airport to determine where the routes and departure tracks should go. We went in and had public meetings very similar to this, got feedback from the citizens and city councils, and made determinations on what would work best for the communities as well as for the airport. The relationships we built allowed us to implement the Metroplex plan in Atlanta without lawsuits.
I cut my teeth on community engagement back then when I was in the FAA, and I’ve carried it forward. This has become kind of a niche for us – to my knowledge, very few other environmental consultants are in this niche on the community side. There’s a lot of them on the airport side, but not very many on the community side.
Here’s a quick overview of the airspace around Seattle and some idiosyncrasies that affect you all directly. One of the things we talked about last night was the Burien turnout. I will not debate the legality of it tonight – that’s an ongoing issue that will be addressed – but I do want to discuss some options of what can be done and why they did what they did.
These two yellow lines here represent the airspace in which the aircraft could turn. If the aircraft depart off of one of the runways here and turn left – I think now they’re turning left to a 250 heading which is more down this way – they could turn as far left as 210 degrees or they could turn as far north as 280 degrees, actually 285 degrees, but terminal controllers usually use round numbers when they’re assigning headings.
The reason for this airspace being the way it is here – usable airspace – is number one, Boeing Field over here. The rule that the FAA is using is that an aircraft departing must be diverging 30° from the missed approach course. The missed approach course off of Boeing Field over here is to the Northwest on about a 310 heading, so you’d have to turn at least to a 280 degree heading here to diverge from the missed approach course at Boeing Field. There are some options to be talked about there.
SECTION 5:
[Jim Allardice]: The other piece I wanted to talk about specifically was the 41 Alpha process. The 41 Alpha process used to be termed the 18-step process – it’s the process that the FAA uses to implement new procedures, and it is done in a collaborative manner with the airport, the FAA, the air traffic controllers, the airlines, and now sometimes cities are involved.
Here, the 41 Alpha process started in 2016, looking at the southbound departures and seeing how they could increase departure capacity. To do that, they had to examine this yellow box here – this is considered the current noise track or noise containment area.
Today, all aircraft that depart southbound off Seattle must remain within this yellow box until they get to the very end of it or 3,000 feet before they can turn. No matter which runway they depart from, they go all the way down here over Federal Way before they make any turns.
One of the suggestions – and I wouldn’t even call it a notional procedure at this point, it was just a discussion in the 41 Alpha meetings working group – was to design a procedure that diverged by a new rule. If you did 15 degrees divergence, it would take it outside of this box before the end of it. If you did 10 degrees, you could stay within this box down to this corner before the aircraft diverge.
The idea was to get the aircraft out over the water as soon as possible and keep them over the water for as long as possible, thereby not flying over your homes. The advantage to the airport is if the aircraft diverge immediately after departure, they can launch aircraft quicker. Right now, minimum separation for aircraft departing in trail is three miles – they have to all be three miles apart if they’re going the same place.
[Sheila Brush]: To clarify your maps – because you have it in a box and that’s not our life. Our life is that they’re turning out over the marina. We’re very familiar with the props, the Q400s. They turn right at takeoff, they’re turning east, and it’s right over our marina, over our East Hill. We are experiencing the wake recat, the frequency of getting the turboprops as you called them, or the Q400s out of the way. So it’s prop, jet, prop, jet, so we are already experiencing the frequency.
SECTION 6:
[Jim Allardice]: Yes ma’am, and I should have said that this is a north operation when they’re departing to the north and they turn west to that 250 heading.
[Sheila Brush]: Nobody will get relief. Nobody in Des Moines is going to get relief because we are long and straight. There’s really no plan to move the flights over another community because I would never want to inflict harm on my neighbor. Those are the type of conversations that I hope we can have with you – not negotiating a turn over my neighbor but how we’re going to manage the growth when we are so confined.
[Jim Allardice]: And that’s one of the beauties of having the four cities involved because you can have those kinds of conversations for the betterment of all. If there is something that all of you can collaboratively agree on and advocate for together procedurally, I think you have a great lobby.
[Sheila Brush]: I realize you did this primarily for the Des Moines area, but what would the box and yellow lines look like north for our friends here from some of the other cities?
[Jim Allardice]: There is a box north. I don’t have that airspace depicted, but I will say this – these red lines are the current departure lines that the jet aircraft take. The jet aircraft do not deviate off those lines until this intersection. From there they do various things. These are just a couple of the departures they have. For instance, northbound departures a lot of times they’ll come out over here over the bay, the sound, and then go to the north. This one is a westbound departure route but they come out here and they turn to the Northwest.
There’s a new departure procedure that they were using – they actually named it the ATOME, which was after this intersection right here. That was going to be used at night. They haven’t implemented it. That was part of that 41 Alpha thing that came out, went North, and they climbed out to the North and then they turned East at night. It was a nighttime-only procedure that they were proposing. But these are the tracks that they take to this RELL intersection.
SECTION 7:
[Unidentified Council Member]: I have another question for our Burien friends – what does King County Airport do? Do they utilize these same turnouts and are they receiving impacts from King County Airport over the White Center area? Are they getting hit by two different airports?
[Jim Allardice]: I am not familiar with King County Airport operations.
[Council Member]: I’m just wondering if they changed the trajectory at which they landed and took off, if it would affect less people. I’ve flown into Oakland once before and it’s like the plane drops out of the sky, and then when they’re climbing it’s like they’re coming straight up. So is the slope changing, and could we get our airport to do that?
[Jim Allardice]: We had a discussion about that yesterday. Today on the ILS (Instrument Landing System), it’s 2.75 degrees. Standard across the country right now is 3 degrees. Generally speaking, in my experience, they do not go higher than a 3-degree glide slope specifically for noise – they will do it for terrain but not for noise. But it is reasonable to expect that they go to a three-degree glide slope for arrivals.
One of the things we talked about – in Greener Skies they implemented some RNP RNAV approaches. RNP stands for Required Navigation Performance, and the RNP arrivals are very precise arrivals. All of those are set up on a three-degree glide path. As more aircraft get equipped to fly those procedures and as the rules change to allow more aircraft to fly those procedures, they can transition to those without having to physically change a glide slope or republish procedures.
On departures, they have two standard departure procedures – the NADP 1 and NADP 2. They’re noise abatement departure procedures. The NADP 1 generally speaking is a steeper climb early that gets them higher faster over the ground. NADP 2 is more of a rate of climb that gets them higher over time. NADP 2 is actually the most generally accepted departure procedure they fly. They have some special procedures that were grandfathered, such as John Wayne Airport, but at virtually all other airports, NADP 2 is standard.
SECTION 8:
[Council Member]: Emily, you talked about earlier having several successes across the country. I just wanted to check – are there any successes that you’ve had that are not these options that we’ve been presented tonight? Can you summarize what successes you see as possible that we could be successful with here?
[Emily Transer]: That’s a really good question. I think the one main thing – and you may have heard it in different meetings – is if you’ve seen one airport, you’ve seen one airport. The options that are available in every scenario or every airport are just different. What could work somewhere could be very detrimental somewhere else.
The success that I’m building on or talking about is really in identifying what those options are. I don’t think this is an exhaustive list – this is just our per question from today. The success that I can really capture and say could be emulated here is that once there are solutions or options, that connection – speaking their language – all of the things that we’ve been able to provide in other cities, that’s where we really had measurable successes.
[Jim Allardice]: One of the examples we gave earlier today was one of our other clients, Laguna Beach. We were able to go into a situation where they were involved in a lawsuit against the FAA for the implementation of new routings in Southern California TRACON airspace. It was with departures out of John Wayne to the South that turned back East, that departed over the water and then came back over the land, normally above 10,000 feet. But what was happening was the aircraft were shortcutting that route and flying over the city.
When we went in, they were in litigation. We asked them to give us a crack at negotiating a settlement agreement. We were able to discuss with the FAA options and basically asked them to keep the aircraft on that existing route they had designed as much as possible. Their retort was that they have to be able to turn aircraft for spacing, for separation, for weather, for restricted airspace – just a litany of reasons why they have to turn airplanes.
My response to them – I was talking to one of their traffic controllers – was “Well, you should.” He was taken aback, really didn’t know how to respond because I agreed with it. But then I said, “Here’s my ask – if you don’t have to, don’t.” They basically chewed on that for a while and said they could agree to do that on a voluntary basis. We entered into a settlement agreement that memorialized that, saying to the maximum extent possible they’ll stay on the route. Today we’re having about an 85-87% compliance rate, and I’ve told the city that about 90% is the best you can ever expect because 10% of the time they’re going to have to turn the airplanes for something.
SECTION 9:
[Jim Allardice]: Down the road there were five or six other cities that had lawsuits filed against the FAA. All of those lawsuits were dismissed, and the only community that got anything was Laguna Beach because we negotiated a settlement agreement with them.
Specifically, does that type of situation apply to you guys here? No. But what’s relevant is that if you can get to the right people, if you can talk to the people that can actually make a decision, you can get in there and get something done. Whether that is through START – we’ve heard that there’s been varying levels of success or failure – but there are some other avenues we’ll explore.
One of the processes we have talked about is to have the four cities make a list of all the things they have asked for through START and give it to us. Let us evaluate that list and parse it and categorize it by:
1. Is this reasonably implementable or not?
2. If it is reasonably implementable, is it easy – low hanging fruit? Is it midterm? Is it long-term implementation?
[Council Member]: We haven’t talked about this peripherally, but I’m wondering if you could summarize to some degree both NextGen overall and then NextGen as applicable to SeaTac airport – to the degree you’re aware that aspects of it are implemented or that there will be implementation.
[Jim Allardice]: NextGen – oh gosh, that is a huge animal. There are so many parts to NextGen. ADS-B is one of them – that’s Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast. It’s a device that aircraft are going to have on board that will enable them to exchange information more efficiently with the ground, giving position data updates every second so you have better surveillance on aircraft. Once all aircraft are equipped with that, it would prevent stuff like losing track of aircraft over oceans.
The aspect of NextGen that affects SeaTac the most is the RNAV – the performance-based navigation aspect. The PBN is what was implemented in Greener Skies. It’s what is used on those departures that I showed you that had the red tracks off of the airport. That’s a procedure known as RNAV off the ground, which means that the aircraft can engage either on the ground or very shortly after leaving the ground a very precise track that they will follow. That is the aspect of NextGen that raises the ire of communities because the paths become so narrow that you’re constantly being overflown very precisely by aircraft one right after another. The wake recat is also another tenant – wake recat is part of NextGen as well.
SECTION 10:
[Jim Allardice]: You know, NextGen’s really gotten a bad rap from all the noise, but like Emily started out saying in the very beginning – if you’ve seen one airport, you’ve seen one airport. The question is: can NextGen be used to the benefit of the surrounding communities? And in certain circumstances, it can. It’s not all bad.
Like I said, at Atlanta we were able to use the precision of those tracks to put the airplanes over a specific area that the communities wanted the airplanes to fly over because it was the least impactful to that community. So in that case, the very precise ground track was a good thing. In other cases, a very precise ground track may not be a good thing – dispersion of the noise over a broader area may be a good thing.
[Council Member]: The followup to that – and we talked about this a little yesterday – we just want to bring it up for the council. You know, the dichotomy in this is that the increase, which I think shows somewhat to Steve’s point relative to the DNL as the measurement, is that as the flight tracks become more precise and the window of variation is closed, the contour shrinks even though the people being overflown are getting killed because the frequency has increased so much within a more constrained space.
[Emily Transer]: I mean, it is really interesting. I look back at the national advocacy work I do and remember NextGen – because what NextGen really is is a federal policy body. It’s the FAA’s movement from ground-based to satellite-based air traffic control. That was something that our national organization supported because if, like Jim said, you use it in places like Atlanta where he designed the tracks to go over what our friend down there calls “the highways in the sky,” you could use it as a really strong tool.
[Jason]: Maybe using supplemental metrics to show the community the current number of events over say 55 dB and then post-project how’s that going to look, because people don’t hear in averages.
[Jim Allardice]: The other piece is it has to be a decision of the communities – do you want to stick with the departures that you have now or do you want to go to a dispersed vector area, headings off of the airport? Let me tell you, any controller worth their salt, if you give them multiple headings to use off the runway, they’re going to take that in a heartbeat. They can spray airplanes all over the sky if that’s what you want, but that would have to be a community decision.
SECTION 11 (Final Section):
[David]: This is a sort of followup to the notion of what the alternatives are, assessment of success and the timing and so forth. We’ve been talking – we haven’t been talking much about impact avoidance here. I think what we all like is that the sort of endgame here is a new airport, and that’s going to be a big battle to be fought.
On impact mitigation, we’re working on that – we’ve got a little bit of that, the Port plants some trees and may put in non-working insulation and so forth. I’ve got a little bit more ambitious idea that perhaps “first, do no harm.” We have a lot of people impacted here. The Port is literally getting away with murder, and the construction which is going on right now, which did not get environmental review – the damage that is being done is incredible.
[Mayor]: I have six minutes to a hard stop, which makes it very difficult, and I apologize that we weren’t able to include public comment tonight. But again, the purpose of our work study is to have the kind of interaction you’ve all experienced here. Hopefully you’ve asked a lot of the questions that you wanted to get asked. We as a council always welcome anybody to correspond with us through email and writing. We’ll make sure the council, Aviation Advisory, and the consultants get those questions so we can get those back to you, and they do become part of our public record.
[Michael Matthias]: Thank you mayor. I’d like to say that this was an important day that we spent a lot of time preparing for. We appreciate the efforts of our consultants to go through a very long day in Des Moines. We probably had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 staff involved in the process today in terms of meetings and briefings and participation.
What it shows to me is a commitment of this city to leave no stone unturned in trying to find a way to mitigate the impacts of SeaTac airport on our city. I think finally I’m pretty hopeful. For the first time since I’ve been in Des Moines, I think we have the tools to understand what our fate looks like based on different options.
[Mayor]: I just want to thank everybody for their time tonight. Our next meeting will be a regular council meeting on June 13th here, and we will have public comment in that. If there are folks that really want to make their comments from the podium, the podium will be there at our next council meeting.
With that I believe we are within about 30 seconds of your hard stop, so do I have a motion to adjourn?
[Council Member Nutting]: Motion.
[Council Member Bangs]: Second.
[Mayor]: All those in favor raise your right hand and say aye.
[Group]: Aye.
[Mayor]: We are adjourned.