Des Moines Airport Committee REV2 first meeting

First meeting of the second version

Airport Advisory Committee – 11 Aug 2025 – Agenda

Research Requests Summary

The committee made several specific research requests at the end of the meeting:

Primary Data/GIS Analysis Request

• Noise contour mapping: Overlay the airport noise contour maps onto Des Moines housing/property maps using GIS
• Property impact analysis: Determine how many housing units, population, and average home values fall within noise impact zones
• Comparative analysis: Use this data to demonstrate the “disproportionate impact” Des Moines experiences versus other King County communities

Survey and Community Input

• Formal resident survey: Develop survey questions to systematically collect concerns from airport-impacted residents
• Neighborhood outreach: Use the Citizen Advisory Board’s nine neighborhood representatives as a distribution network
• Farmers market booth: Collect input at community events

Financial/Tax Analysis

• Port tax calculation: Determine exactly how much property tax Des Moines residents pay to the Port of Seattle
• Property tax mitigation options: Research potential tax breaks for noise-impacted properties as compensation

Historical Research

• Previous committee history: Understand why the last airport advisory committee disbanded to avoid repeating past mistakes
• City’s SAMP concerns: Catalog the city’s specific concerns about the airport master plan

Individual Member Perspectives

Joe Dusenberry (Chair)

Background: Former 25-year city employee, current START member Perspective: Pragmatic systems thinker focused on political leverage

• What’s possible: Believes noise/flight reduction is futile; focus should be on compensation/mitigation
• Strategy: Shift focus from FAA to Port of Seattle as a King County taxing district
• Goal: Use King County tax dollars to compensate airport communities for disproportionate impacts
• Key insight: “This benefits everybody in King County but disproportionately impacts airport communities”

Jeff Bogen (Vice Chair)

Background: 26-year FAA operations manager for western US Perspective: Technical expert who understands regulatory limitations

• What’s possible: Incremental improvements in enforcement and monitoring of existing rules
• Strategy: Focus on sound insulation compliance, more noise sensors, ensuring adherence to existing standards
• Goal: Make sure the Port follows through on commitments rather than fighting unwinnable regulatory battles
• Key insight: “Money is not going to solve this problem… we can make sure it’s enforced”

Barton DeLacy

Background: Commercial real estate appraiser with urban planning background Perspective: Data-driven real estate expert focused on economic impacts

• What’s possible: Quantify impacts to create leverage for compensation
• Strategy: Use sophisticated real estate analysis to demonstrate economic harm, partner with universities for research
• Goal: Develop metrics showing property value impacts that can be used to negotiate tax relief or other compensation
• Key insight: Focus on “real estate” and “finding some levers” through economic analysis

Steve Reagin

Background: Analytics professional, longtime area resident Perspective: Data analyst wanting to cut through airport industry spin

• What’s possible: Better analysis of airport-provided data to reveal true impacts
• Strategy: Apply professional analytical skills to challenge airport’s data presentations
• Goal: Provide independent analysis to support community positions
• Key insight: “The airport likes to throw lots of data at us” – wants to analyze it properly

Todd Downing

Background: Born/raised under flight path, local business owner Perspective: Community advocate testing Port’s willingness to engage

• What’s possible: Establish meaningful dialogue and relationship with the Port
• Strategy: See if the Port will genuinely listen to community concerns or if it’s just performative
• Goal: Create “some sort of dialogue” and get the Port to address “externalities”
• Key insight: Growth has been “unabated” with “no breaks to the system” – wants to test if real engagement is possible

Collective Strategic Direction

The group seems to be coalescing around a compensation/mitigation strategy rather than trying to reduce airport operations. They want to:

1. Document the problem with hard data (noise maps + property values + tax burden)
2. Demonstrate disproportionate impact compared to other King County communities
3. Shift the conversation from FAA regulations to Port of Seattle accountability
4. Seek compensation through tax relief, property value protection, or direct payments
5. Use King County political leverage since residents are Port taxpayers

This represents a pragmatic pivot from traditional “stop the airport” activism to “make the airport pay for its impacts” strategy.

Transcript

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Meeting Opening

Rebecca Deming (Community Development Director): Okay, welcome to the very first airport advisory committee. I want to let everyone know that you’re going to have to hit the little button on the front when you speak so that you can be picked up on the recording as we record these and eventually put them out over Zoom so the public can come on starting the next meeting they’ll be available on Zoom. Right now they’re just being recorded and put up on our YouTube channel.

I’m Rebecca Deming and the community development director. I will have my staff member here introduce himself in a second. My department will always have a staff member here. We’ll staff this and then we’ll have someone from the clerk who helps us record and run these meetings as needed. So if I’m not here, someone else will be, but it’ll be usually me that you probably email if there’s something you need or any questions you have, and I’ll make sure that someone from my department is here to help and help you through these meetings.

But really, these are your meetings. So as we get into later in this items, we’ll discuss how these meetings will operate. We’ll even discuss if this is the right time for you guys and how you want to operate these meetings when we get to item number six. But it really is your meeting. So we’re more here to support you. So go ahead Jason, if you’d like to introduce yourself.

Jason Woycke (Senior Planner): Yeah, Jason Woycke, a senior planner here at the city. I’ve been participating in start meetings for about a year when Denise Lethre, our previous community development director, retired. And now I am an alternate rep.

Rebecca Deming: And so when the rest of you introduce yourself, if you guys would like to go ahead and answer the questions we put in the agenda so we get to kind of know you, why you’re here and what you want to achieve out of this committee.

Member Introductions

Jeff Bogen: Sure. I’ll go ahead and start. So I’m Jeff Bogen. So it’s really nice to meet everybody. These are challenging times for the folks that live around the airport. My background is I was the operation manager for the Federal Aviation Administration for the entire western United States. So covered all the technical aspects, landing systems, navigation, radar, automation systems at all the TRACON, all the ARTCCs from Alaska, the Aleutian Islands down to California, covered all the major airports, LAX, so had a team of engineers and have been engaged in most aspects of airport construction, particularly the technical aspects, the engineering aspects.

We did a lot of work on many of the projects in SeaTac and were engaged in doing thousands of evaluations on terms of safety and impacts to navigation. I happen to live in Des Moines and I was challenged to speak out publicly on any of the issues particularly the congestion, the pollution issues, the noise issues, all the things that you might encounter when you’re on final approach and which we are. And so when you have 45 planes coming down when they’re really hitting it, there are many challenges to address all of the issues in terms of pollution, noise pollution, all the regulations engaged in why things are so challenging to make any changes of substance.

Regulations around ultra fine particles, which there aren’t any right now. And that’s a really big challenge. These rules were made in the 70s, some of them in the 70s and 80s, with not a lot of science. So I really enjoy working on those issues. Nobody can do this alone. There is a collaborative effort that is between the port and the airport and the FAA that I hope to be able to participate to see if we can’t gain a little traction in those teams and the airlines paying a little more attention to late night operations, the air flow issues, approach angles and departure angles that might be talked about again. There’s a lot of really interesting issues to look at.

I don’t know if any of… I don’t know the background but I’ve been in aviation and aviation research for like 25 years so was with the FAA for 26 years and really hope to work with the community to see what we can do to really highlight some of the issues around the impacts to the folks. You know, there may be 10,000 folks here. You got 50 million plus passengers a year and it’s going up 1% a year. You got 430,000 operations. You know, we’re a small group of about, you know, a few thousand people. You got millions of people. How do you make a change? How can you affect some sort of change and raise the awareness? So, that’s what I’m here to do. To help that process in any way I can. This team is one of the ways to do that. So, I’m looking forward to working with everybody here.

Todd Downing: All right. Hi everyone. I’m Todd Downing. I applied for this because I was born and raised under the flight path and I’ve kind of seen the growth of it over the course of my life and I currently live under the flight path and I own a business that’s under the flight path. And I’m just very curious to see how willing the port is to work with the communities that are affected by the externalities and kind of address some of the issues that we bring up. So largely I want to achieve some sort of dialogue and I hope that they’re willing to listen to some of our concerns because it’s kind of grown unabated and I feel like there’s really no breaks to the system. It’s all kind of gas as the area grows. So that’s kind of my concern.

Joe Dusenberry: Joe Dusenberry. I was recently retired from the city. Well, I guess it’s been five or six years. But I worked for the city for 25 years. I moved up here in 1994 and retired I think in 2019, 2020. I had some time and I wanted to stay involved with some of the issues. So I applied for and got a position on the START. Got appointed to START.

My motivation really was I got here right when the third runway fight was really starting to boil over and I thought that there was just some mistakes made in how we went about that and it really crippled our community for many years and echoes of that still bouncing back and forth. The other thing is I just wanted to find out more about the airport, how it works, you know, what the constraints are, what are some of the benefits.

I found out that START after a year being on there is… I assume that it was some kind of a decision-making body. It really isn’t. START is really just an information. It’s a place where we can go and get information about what’s going on at the port. There’s no realistic decisions being made there. And then again I want to… how can we… where can we start talking to people who will address our concerns and my concerns are basically…

For instance, we spent a lot of time talking about the legislative priorities in Olympia. Some of those basically have nothing to do… you know, sustainable aviation fuel has nothing to do with the quality of life here immediately in Des Moines. Maybe for our grandchildren, but there’s no point in us getting too excited about that. The search for another airport, which we’re basically paying for with our tax dollars, that’s not going to benefit us. It’s not going to reduce the use of SeaTac airport. So where do we… how… who do we talk to? It’s not START. It’s got to be… it has to… there has to be a different approach here somehow.

The other thing that I found out is that whether it’s intentional or it’s just the way it is, the port is able to really deflect or redirect a lot of our concerns by saying we can’t do anything about that. That’s the FAA saying, “Hey, we’re going to go talk to somebody in Olympia about that.”

To me, the Port of Seattle is a countywide district and the citizens of King County pay taxes to the Port of Seattle. This is a district problem. This is a King County problem. And I don’t think we need to somehow shift the focus from trying to get money out of the FAA or trying to get Olympia to pay for this or pay for that. Take a look at the tax dollars that are generated by the taxpayers here in King County and use those resources to mitigate the impacts to the airport communities.

The difficulty is talking to our citizens in King County and saying, “Hey, this is really, when you get right down to it, for the size and location, this is an amazing facility. It generates tons of money. People come here from all over the country, geographically, we’re located in a position that can pretty much non-stop access a quarter of the northern hemisphere. This is an amazing facility, but it benefits everybody in King County. This facility benefits everybody in King County, but it disproportionately impacts the airport communities and we need to talk about how we can compensate the airport communities.”

And the other thing that’s really I think super important is we have to get across the idea that look this whole thing is propped up by our property taxes and now you’re going to go out and borrow how many more billions of dollars? So any place where property values are being held back or deteriorating because of the impacts, we should be mitigating that. That’s not going to do anybody any good. So anyway, those are some of my thoughts about why I, you know, not necessarily why I got started with START, but where I am now.

Steve Reagin: Hi, my name is Steve Reagin. I’ve lived here in Des Moines for just about 11 years now. Before that I lived up in the Gregory Heights neighborhood of Burien for 16 years, so I’ve been in this area for a long time. My wife grew up here. For a long time now I’ve served on nonprofit boards for different organizations and was looking for a different way to be able to serve and that’s when I saw this become available and wanted to be a part of it. I’ve got a background in analytics that I think could help out. But I understand that the airport likes to throw lots of data at us from our chat not too long ago. So, I’m pretty good at, you know, that’s what I do professionally is go through a lot of data. So, I thought I could bring some of that kind of analytical expertise to the group.

I also grew up near the Atlanta airport. So, I’ve lived most of my life around one kind of airport or the other and never known how things actually work, how things get done, how the airport, the port itself works with the surrounding communities. So, it’s going to be a little bit of a learning experience for me as well. Yeah, so that’s me in a nutshell.

Barton DeLacy: I’m Barton DeLacy. I’m a newcomer to the community. I’ve been here only five years, but my wife’s family… her grandfather moved a house to Woodmont where we live in I think 1945. So I’ve been coming up here for 45 years. Originally from Portland, raised my family there, but then was in Chicago for 12 and a half years. I’m a valuer or commercial real estate appraiser. But I have a masters in urban planning. I’ve served on planning commissions.

And interestingly I’ve had a lot of experience in working with ports and the valuation of the real estate around the port even unto… when my indoctrination to Chicago was sitting on a large group that was trying to value Midway Airport when they were attempting to privatize it. It was a great education and I mean we had a meeting in New York with 30 people and they were all you know thousand dollar hour lawyers and experts and so I will take a backseat to Jeff regarding operations on the airport but the real estate is something else and to Joe’s point about finding some way to get compensation.

We have to focus again not on the FAA but on the port which is an authority which is supported by tax dollars and it’s all about real estate. And so I’m hoping to lend some… I’ve worked nationally. I also live in the flight path. I mean, we have this wonderful view and you just… I’ve lived next to rail, you know, railroads and the L in Chicago, but you know, every night it’s every 45 seconds and we’re… if we’re any closer, we’d have to stop conversation if we’re outside, but it’s still… it’s disruptive, you know, and you have the windows open at night in the summer and you know, it’s… okay.

But I am hoping that we can find some levers also as I’ve gotten to know the city of Des Moines and our new city manager and the opportunities that are here in the city with real estate owned and with 509… the Marine View Drive, as I understand, is going to kind of go back to the city once they open up. So, we have some opportunities to kind of I think be creative and tap into community talent.

And like I say, I work for Cushman Wakefield. It’s an international real estate firm. I’ve been there 13 of my last 20 years. I work in downtown Seattle, so I have access I think to some of the talent down there that could maybe help us out here whether it’s the Runstad School at University of Washington or you know the development community which I’m somewhat in touch with. So I’m looking forward to this and working with you all.

Committee Leadership Elections

Rebecca Deming: Thank you. Well, now that you guys know each other, I’m hoping to turn this meeting over to you. So, I’m hoping to look for nominations for a chair and a vice chair. The chair will run these meetings and go through the agenda and give everyone a chance to speak. Obviously, we’ll talk a little bit more of that when we get to policies and procedures. But between you guys, now…

Committee Member: I nominate Joe for chairman. I think he has the experience and could kick us off.

Joe Dusenberry: More than willing to do it, but I’m also more than willing to share. I know Jeff has a lot of expertise, so I would nominate Jeff for vice chair.

Jeff Bogen: That would be fine. But Joe, I do think there’s a lot of leverage having you been on START understanding some of the past history. Bringing that together so that we focus on the right things where we can make a difference. And I’m certainly willing to help out wherever we need to. But I think maybe give us… go ahead and give it a start and let’s see where it goes.

Rebecca Deming: So we have a nomination. Do we have a second?

[Voting occurs]

Rebecca Deming: So, do we have a nomination for vice chair?

Committee Member: Nominate Jeff.

Committee Member: Second.

[Voting occurs]

Rebecca Deming: Okay. I’ll go ahead and turn it over to Joe for the rest of the agenda if you’d like. If not, I can continue for this one and we can turn it over for the next meeting.

Joe Dusenberry: Why don’t you continue?

Rebecca Deming: Not a problem.

START Introduction

Rebecca Deming: So, our next one is kind of a START introduction. I provided a website on here so that you had the website to START so that you can look at it whether you did it before or now. We have a little PowerPoint presentation that Jason’s gonna kind of go over.

Jason Woycke: All right. Introduction to START. Just a little background for everybody that’s here and listening as well. START stands for SeaTac… acronym I guess stakeholder advisory roundtable.

So per the Port of Seattle START provides the port with a dedicated forum intended to enhance cooperation and tackle airport related issues of most relevance to SeaTac’s neighboring cities. START brings together all the relevant parties with a common purpose to share information collaborate and achieve results. And I think it’s true… I think it’s useful in sharing information as well as collaborating and I think some results are achieved at least Joe.

There’s this link there on your agenda that’ll take you to the START page. It has some good stuff including operating procedures and as well as past meeting materials.

Moving on to community members which you’ll be voting for or recommending for city appointing. Joe is currently a community member with START in addition to the one city of Des Moines non-elected employee and her alternates. So the city of Des Moines non-elected employee is officially Katherine, our city manager. Rebecca is an alternate. I’m an alternate. I’m also part of the technical review committee for the working group. There are some… there’s a different membership for that.

So in addition to the city members, two Des Moines START members shall be community members. They must reside own a business or property or be employed within the city, but they cannot serve as an elected official. Members will be appointed for a two-year term. All members and alternates who serve on START will serve as at the pleasure of their appointing bodies. There’s some more conditions up there.

Additional members in START include two airline reps… Alaska and Delta at least typically… one air cargo rep and the airport managing director or their alternate and a port of Seattle rep. There are also within the START meetings often FAA participants… there’s actually facilitators of the meetings under… their name is Uncommon Bridges and there also various presentations and presenters that attend those meetings.

And so more about meetings which is what START is all about.

There’s the START steering committee which provides support, guidance, and strategic direction for START. And that happens at least once a year. I don’t know if it’s just once or more often, but I’ve attended one in-person meeting at the airport. Community members do not attend steering committee meetings but city reps do.

Then there are START regular meetings. These are the big ones. There are six a year that are typically scheduled on the fourth Wednesday of the month. Community members are encouraged to attend. There’ll be discussions about various topics, presentations, summary of working group meetings. Sometimes you’ll find elected officials present, state elected officials etc.

And then moving on to the working groups, these are a subset of meetings. So the policy working group typically meets every other month. These are optional for community members. This is a forum to discuss policies and coming up with shared priorities. As Joe mentioned, day in Olympia happened. I wasn’t involved in that.

I don’t know if Anthony Hemstead still represents the city in any way, but yeah, he’s often participating on those. There’s the aviation noise working group which I attend. There’s actually one tonight starting at 5.

These are optional again for community members.

So my role is basically to attend these meetings. I share the info to my city manager Rebecca.

I also try to get questions answered. You know, if you have any questions, I’ll try to get the answer for you. And as another subcommittee within that working group is the technical review committee. And that has different members and liaison. It’s kind of a little confusing, but tonight the airport noise aviation noise working group is meeting and on the agenda includes the sound installation program and the new sound contour map.

So I’ll be learning more about that tonight and yeah, if you have any questions. So I think we can also maybe hear from Joe about the meeting since he’s been attending and you know he would be good example if you’d like to talk about it of what you guys would be… the other person would be doing. You know any person attending providing updates is helpful to staff that way we hear if a staff member wasn’t able to attend then you can hear what you took from it but Joe if you’d like to provide any additional information.

Joe’s START Experience

Joe Dusenberry: I think to be might be really effective, I think we really need to focus on a few things. You know, one of them the things that would help us the most is that the sound package repair program, which at this point is kind of stalled out. The keeping pressure on the port for the late night noise thing and you’re right they’ve been sort of effective about getting that some voluntary… you know voluntary at least 2 to 5 in the morning. So that some things are pretty effective, but again to make it to really have some kind of an impact…

Like for instance, we’ve got the steering committee and community members don’t attend. So to start with there’s sort of a filter that any issues to be talked about go through this other filter first before the community members get there. So in some ways that seems like they’re actually steering the conversation, you know. So, but I don’t know if there’s any…

Committee Member: Does that mean that from if Katherine’s a member, does she go to a steering committee then?

Jason Woycke: That’s correct.

Joe Dusenberry: All right. So, for us to get something on the agenda, we have to go to Jason or somebody and they have to go to the steering committee and get it on and I don’t know what the process is if that’s, you know, hey, great idea, we’ll put it on the agenda or it’s put it in a queue. I don’t know how they actually come up with the agenda items. So…

But policy working group I’ve been attending both of those meetings. What you’ll find out is that there’s… it really comes down to three or four people that will comment and that are really super interested in it and the rest of us are probably… you know. So, yeah, the noise working group obviously is where we get the most input from the community. Policy working group is like I said that’s almost irrelevant for us.

Jeff Bogen: I think I agree. I think it’s very difficult to challenge some of the like the 65 dB DNL those rules which have been in place for a very long time based not on science but again on people’s perception of noise is not no longer appropriate not used in Europe anymore. I mean there’s a lot of things going on and the FAA has not pursued vigorously a new policy this there’s some research being done clearly there’s related illness around noise that is documented now but fighting that within this group the 65 number and trying to get it down to something like 45 which is what they use in the EU is very difficult for this team to work on. So that’s probably not one of the areas we would focus on.

The areas that where we’re looking at insulating people’s homes, making sure that they take a measurement in people’s home to make sure that it’s actually reducing it by 20 dB or more to ensure that it doesn’t go over standards that have been agreed on. Those are things where we can perhaps ensure that that process is happening and moving along. And the meetings are at 5:00 pm if that helps.

Jason mentioned the technical review committee and that’s for the part 150 study and for what I’ve… the initial map I saw and I think they call it the area of impact or there’s a new line they’re proposing but it looked to me like again the… even within the airport communities I feel that sometimes the impacts are not spread out evenly they’re not… and for instance if the map they’ve shown us before is the map that actually gets adopted. The largest… and I’m assuming that the area is getting larger because this plan goes out to 2032 and they’re just saying okay by 2032 we’re going to have this much more traffic and this much more noise.

They want to increase even in nighttime operations a few more nighttime operations formally. One can only wonder how much that’s going to be adhered to. So it’s a time weighted average part 150. And so you’ll notice that on those profiles it does extend a little further out. The contours have extended. It’s not very far out but it’s a little far out. And they are particular facilities… churches and schools that they’ve had to include to accommodate that.

But again the actual monitoring itself some of the technical information about where they’re monitoring it’s all modeled. This is just… this is a model. This is not an actual representation of the noise itself where we probably don’t have enough sensors in the area to do it yet. It should be one thing this committee could do is make a recommendation to provide more sensors in those impacted areas to actually align the model with what really is coming out today to ensure that that’s being compliant. There are folks in the FAA that are supposed to be doing things like that. But there’s some pretty good monitoring tools, but it’s all about additional monies for the equipment itself. It’s pretty sophisticated microphone assembly. It’s all been calibrated and so it has to be exactly right. But we need empirical data, science-based data, actual data rather than using their noise modeling based on the type of aircraft it is, the elevations they traveling at.

So but we can make a difference there to ensure that we that that they adhere to that model that model doesn’t go up by more than one and a half dB which is the limit. So again, every one of the SAMP issues, no impact. No impact. Well I never say much about that before, but clearly there is an impact. And when you run a plane every 45 seconds and you add a few more at night, that’s a pretty big impact to the folks that live there.

So the noise issue again on part 150 is really hard to work it at the national issue national level to change the thresholds nationally but we can make sure that they adhere to what they say they’re going to do as we roll towards 2030. I think when they rolled out that new map that’s how they characterize they said well there’s not much of a change but the largest change is in the southwest corner.

Joe Dusenberry: Yep. And that’s us and I believe that is because they just are going to be using the third runway more as traffic builds up. You know, the other day when I came in, we were all landing on the third runway and taking off on the first. So, I think that’s… it used to be that, you know, the 34 right was used less often. And so they are changing… they’re adding concourses, so they’re actually adding capacity, building in capacity to the airport. At this point, they’re not slowing down. Nothing’s going to slow them down except if we get some health lawsuits against them or perhaps again some tragically an accident or something that might slow things down. And as it did in Newark, where people took another look at the density of traffic, but again, there hasn’t been a fatality. It’s incredibly safe. Obviously, the FAA is incredibly safe. You have, you know, a billion people a year flying and maybe have an accident once every five years. I mean that’s one in 10 million. So the risk level is extremely low and yet the public perception of risk is very very high. So there’s a ton of money coming in to address those things. But we’re not going to be able to change the basic rules. But we can do is make sure it’s enforced. And there certainly are going to add more flights. And so what… how slowing those things down when you’re having these multi-billion dollar projects is extremely difficult thing to do. That’s probably not realistic for this team to take on in terms of their working towards increased capacity and reduce delays.

Discussion on Data and Metrics

Joe Dusenberry: I couldn’t agree more with the futility of reducing noise or flights. I don’t think that’s going to happen. What I am wondering about if we couldn’t… I know you’ve talked about all the statistics that the port has and maybe we have to generate a few of our own and in particular I’d be interested in developing a metric that would demonstrate the disproportionate impact which the city of Des Moines experiences versus everyone else. And you’ve got a countywide and I can imagine doing an interesting… we have enough small communities incorporated that we could get fairly discrete numbers I would think regarding flight that would show that you know north county is just… it’s not a big deal. We all pay the same in taxes. But and I think if we could develop a metric that’s something we could take not to the FAA but to the port and start talking about distribution of money and since you can’t mitigate the impacts of the noise and the flights. We can’t really do anything about that. There’s a modest impact positively possibly by pilots living here. But do they want to live here with all that noise? maybe they’d rather live, you know, go out to Maple Valley or someplace and you could, you know, you could show interestingly commuting times that you wouldn’t have to live here if you worked at the airport. And at the same time, we could again sort of develop a metric and if we looked at sort of the… I won’t say there’s discretionary money, but there is, you know, something there at the port in terms of, you know, cost benefit. And if we could start to demonstrate the cost to the community of Des Moines and that’s a number if we did develop it that’s something we can give to our legislators because it’s easy it’s something we could have a nice map and I think it’s something that with… we could get creative how do we survey how do we come up with a metric and that’s where I think interestingly we could potentially work with anyone from Highline up to the Runstad school at Washington this would be a very interesting project for them to undertake and there’s funding available sometimes for this type of study that we could get from outside groups my counselors of real estate… I’m on a foundation there that we’re always looking to for this kind of project it’d be groundbreaking we’d have to work with a professor there or something but I think that would be an interesting…

I think given that we’re most of us are kind of lay people maybe not Jeff but the rest of us are in terms of dealing with this. But we understand what we understand the impacts and we just have to come up with a metric a number to measure that better. And we could there’s a lot of real estate data that we could also play with… show the relative impacts. You know, our home… why might home values in Des Moines be marginally lower if you’re, you know, not the wide, but every any place else in the city and what is that kind of an impact and and there are again we could come up with some numbers to show that and maybe tie it to increases in flights and such. So that’s I think where we could do the most good.

Jeff Bogen: The data is there actually most of the noise data has been either both modeled and empirically measured. And they’re doing, you know, there’s an enormous database of flights. Oh, and you can you can sort and search on them in any area you want.

Barton DeLacy: So, we just… Right. And so, we just start laying that over using GIS, just lay that over the apartments, apartment rents, and we can start attributing marginally lower values. It’s a relative number to that. And those are kind tax break or something.

Joe Dusenberry: Well, that’s right. What I’m talking about is really to make a real difference tax breaks to folks that are impacted. And so that would make that could that could be potentially something to hold those house values up realizing that they’re not going to get assessed the same number. That seems like a fair thing to start opening a discussion with some legislative folks and help.

Barton DeLacy: Right. Yes. Another tact would be to translate that into some, you know, as the city struggles to pay for services and it has some assets but not others. That a good way to help the city have more liquid assets that would promote development here would be you know finding a way to fun you know allow the city to acquire property that could be then sold or leveraged to benefit the city as a whole. So there but I hadn’t thought about a property tax that’s a great idea.

Joe Dusenberry: Yeah, as I’m sorry, just one quick thing just on that disproportionate impact theme. Need a clarification. I went to I attended an FAA presentation and they said that that the airport operates north flow south flow and south flow is about 75% of the time. Yeah, prevailing winds are coming from the south and southwest. And so you always want to land into the…

Jeff Bogen: And when we talk about technology helping us out there and there are things technology is helping out with the noise but again if we have 75… if it’s 75% south flow to me that means we get 75% of the takeoffs and the technology out there and tell me if I’m correct in repeating this to people but the technology out there that is helping the airlines is largely on the landings. There is pilot discretion when you are if you’re a pilot you have discretion how quickly you can take off. There are limitations about limitations on the plane and the load on the plane but they can take off rather quickly and get up quickly. And they also can land at a higher elevation. They glide slope to be changed. It has been done around the country and it’s been done in Europe a few places. Pilots don’t like it. They like to be stable when they come down for a landing. They like to be, you know, five, six miles out. They want the gears down. That brings up a bunch of turbulence and noise. So all of that adds to it. And changing the glide slope coming down a little bit higher for those folks. If you can get another thousand feet, you can reduce it by almost like 4 dB. 10 dB is half the volume that you perceive. Three. So if you can get down below that number, if you get it down by half, that’d be incredible. But you have to be up several thousand feet, that’s not going to happen. But you could come in at a higher glide slope. That’s been talked about a lot. It’s a technical issue. It this team may not be the right place to work on that. It’s been pretty much put to sleep here.

But are we correct? Would we be correct in saying, hey, technology is there, but again, if this split 75/25, the technology is mostly helping out on the landing side. So the landing is always three degrees. You’re always… they are always coming down three degrees is always straight in and it’s always straight in for about five miles on final. So that’s… that that’s the three degrees can go up to four. But changing it to have them come in sooner is something that pilots really will push back extremely hard on. You probably won’t win that battle. The risk management around that would probably not something you can win, but you can get them to take off a little more quickly. And so that’s the… and so that that gets folks up and out more quickly and they can align the routes a little bit. Jason Pool I believe is a member of this team. I’ve worked with him for years on flight procedures. And so those are things that can be talked about but I’m not sure this this that this team is the right place to work all those issues.

But the technology is allowing us to be more precise. It’s actually hurting us. In fact the new technology is making it possible to increase capacity, fly planes closer together supposedly and still retain safety safety retain safety margins. So new technology is not helping us, it’s actually hurting us for impacted communities.

Another fact check… what I tell people when I talk to them is that regard and this is about the FAA. I say, look, we have to somehow pivot, get the port to this discussion to pivot away from, oh, the FAA is going to take care of this because regardless of who’s in control of Congress, regardless of who’s in the White House, for the next decade, we are probably looking at lower funding all across the federal spectrum. So, is it realistic to just assume that there that we all we have to do is turn on the FAA spigot and money is going to flow into this community? No. I’m saying money is not going to solve the problem.

Joe Dusenberry: Yeah. See, that that’s the thing. You know, the FAA is a regulatory agency. I mean, they do a lot of maintenance. They take care of stuff, but they’re basically run by a lot of rules. I mean, the FARs are, you know, there’s thousands and thousands of rules. And that’s what the FAA does best. Interpret the rules. It’s very slow. It’s methodical. It’s done… it’s done slowly so that mistakes aren’t made. And I can regale everybody with lots of FAA interesting stories as we… but I don’t think that… I don’t think that money you know there are there’s about 10 billion dollars coming into the FAA that was never there before. The FAA has both really old equipment, legacy equipment. Everybody picks on that equipment. Like the computers are really old. Well, that’s not really true. Actually, they have a lot of systems. They’re all Unix based. And you don’t want the best computer, the brand new thing, all cuts off-the-shelf stuff. You want solid stuff that’s been around that works. And so, there’s a enormous public misconception that, buying all new stuff is going to fix all these problems. And in fact, that’s probably not going to be true. It may cause the controllers to be a little more happy at the fact that the screens don’t come blank as often. But even then the system’s quite safe but money is not going to fix this problem. Not coming into the FAA. No, the port… the port is the one that is going to make determinations about how much what the capacity needs to be. The runway capacity right now we’re… we’re not bumping up against the top of the runway capacity. They can run about 90 right now operations per hour. They run, you know, during perfect fair weather they can they’re at like 80 so they could go up by 10 and that’s what they plan on doing and not incur any more than like 15 minute delays. And so that’s what they’re moving towards. And the technology is only going to allow that to happen more rapidly. So it’s a hard path to dump money in and expect the FAA to do anything because really they’re just following the rules. They just simply follow the rules and analyze risk, approve projects and so and it’s a very slow everything that’s being done in the FAA is very slow. So all the processes you see are very slow.

Rebecca Deming: So I’m going to try and bring us back into the agenda. Are there any questions about START itself and we could talk about strategies for the airport later? Finish the presentation. We did. Okay. So I wanted to see if there was any questions before we move to the next and asked for a nomination for a START representative.

START Representative Nomination

Rebecca Deming: The nomination will then go to council. So even though you guys will vote for the nomination, it will go to council for a formal selection.

Barton DeLacy: I’ll volunteer.

Joe Dusenberry: It’s not terribly time-consuming. Yeah, the meetings are very structured. Too bad.

Rebecca Deming: Yeah. Is this in addition to…

Jason Woycke: Yes. Yes. It’s in addition to because we have two community members. So, we need a second community member.

Rebecca Deming: So, we’ve got self-nomination of Barton and we got a second. So, do we want to vote?

[Voting occurs]

SAMP Update

Rebecca Deming: Okay. So the next item on the agenda is the SAMP. I provided a website. I’m not going to go into too much with the time we have. I wanted to kind of give an update on the timing of and where the SAMP was at on their environmental review. So, hopefully you had a chance to look at the website and understand that the SAMP is basically a project that they’re doing. And they’ve released an environmental document that we have responded to. I don’t know if you guys have stayed on top of that and seen the city’s response. We are also part of a four city ILA where we responded as a group to that environmental document and the environmental document that came out was under NEPA and so it was under the federal environmental regulations versus the state environmental regulations. And so we recently got or it’s been almost a month now an update on the timing of all of those like response to our comments and response to everyone’s comments. And so we’re being told as of right now they’re expecting to publish a decision on that no later than October 31st.

And then once the FAA issues that decision, then the port expects to publish their draft SEPA EIS in quarter one of next year. So that’s the timing we’re seeing right now.

Barton DeLacy: So just from a… I think Steve Edmiston who’s an attorney in our the Woodmont area and I presented a critique of SAMP which I read and then it sounded a lot like I think the city of Burien had one as well. The comments were similar and the essence is that and I’m not sure which body does it but we didn’t get an environmental impact statement which I normally abhor but would be a vehicle to better examine some of the health issues that Jeff has brought up but that what they got was kind of a review that said oh there’s nothing to see here it’s fine and move along move along move along and so I’m wondering how or to what extent and maybe that the city was in favor of an EIS or what what happened with that?

Rebecca Deming: So yeah, so there is an EIS expected under the state under SEPA. Okay, they’ve already said that there is a determination of significance and that an EIS will be issued. Okay, under SEPA and they’re saying the expected timeline is Q1 of next year. Okay, they did not issue an EIS under NEPA. Most cities feel that it probably should have been an EIS, but that is not what they issued. A lot of our comments and a lot of cities suggested that it possibly… now we’re waiting to see their response to comments. Okay. And where it goes from there is going to be up to both this committee’s recommendation to council and what council wants to do from there. If they’re but again we don’t know their response until we find out their response when it comes out by what they’re saying is October 31st. Okay. So we don’t know if they’re going to come back and do more environmental or if they’re just going to say here’s your response to our comments. We felt we’ve completed all of the NEPA requirements. But again we SEPA has said it will be a full EIS. So under the state which does have stricter rules than NEPA, it is supposed to be a EIS and they have said over and over again that it will be an EIS, not just an EA, an environmental assessment. It will be a full EIS.

Again, we have a four city ILA. We may or may not be looking at amending it, including whether we need to add legal services. So if there is a need to discuss legal services as it relates to the environmental or not that there could be an amendment until we know what’s going on or what direction council wants to go. Those are stuff that we’ll bring back here for a recommendation to council. Also with the SEPA that it comes out if there’s any change that we want to do in the ILA… it doesn’t really require it if we want a new consultant or anything like that but if we want to make changes or updates again the timing has changed so depending on if we need to extend the ILA we may need to update it anyway so we most likely bring it through you guys to make a recommendation to council on that ILA. I don’t have it here. I just wanted to give you guys an update of where we were at. We would probably be looking at it next month if anything.

Meeting Policies and Procedures

Rebecca Deming: And then the next item is meeting policies and procedures. I just kind of wanted to check with you to see time of this meeting. If this works and you know we could some we can move some of it. And a lot of you I have a thing of what you guys were available. Most of you didn’t put four o’clock and put before 4 o’clock, but this was what time the room was available. But if we moved it online and then came in person at 4 when we needed to meet in person, we could move it, you know, to more availability. But I just wanted to if you want to put up I put your guys’ availability based on your survey. So you guys knew everyone’s what you guys voted on. And so Monday was the most available for everybody. And so I just I wanted to discuss both timing, amount of time you wanted to have these meetings, if an hour seemed right, if you wanted to set them for longer. And what how you guys wanted to handle these meetings. I wanted to leave that discussion to you guys since it’s your meeting.

Committee Member: We get kicked out at five.

Rebecca Deming: We don’t. I think we may want to keep but I wanted to but I wanted to set but I wanted to set an expectation of time so if people are taking time out of their time to be here you know and things like that has some value to get started here and if we got a lot of folks that are leaving talk about virtual meetings but let’s keep it in person for a little while.

Joe Dusenberry: I agree.

Steve Reagin: Yeah I can’t do any I was the one with the most with the worst timing availability. I can’t do anything before this because of you know because of work. So it was fine you know get a good keeps me from commuting into town and an hour probably probably seems reasonable. We have special stuff we’ll just get together in a different way or stay one time but having that hour I think helps us keep on track.

Committee Member: Yeah. Stay on the agenda.

Rebecca Deming: Yes. Okay. Like to say it’s great. Yeah. Is there any other items about the meeting specifically that you guys would like to discuss any specific processes or…

Committee Member: So we’re meeting how often?

Rebecca Deming: It’s once a month. Once a month. Okay. And well and that’s part of the discussion a little bit is this is your meeting. So if you guys don’t tell me that like if I don’t have anything that I need to meet like a specific recommendation. So, for instance, like I said, if there was possibly an ILA update or the SAMP EIS came out to meet with you guys, if I don’t have something specific I need to discuss with you, if you guys don’t tell me you have something you need to meet on, I won’t have anything for the agenda. So, everything should go through the chair for you guys. I’m going to cancel the meeting because it’s your meeting. So, if I don’t have something and you don’t have something, it’s an ad hoc meeting, so there won’t be a meeting. So that’s part of this is if I need you, if you want to meet, I’ll probably ask at each at the end of each item. If you have something for the next meeting you’d like to put on the agenda, we’ll note it and we’ll do that kind of this one. I’m asking what do you need in terms of documents? If there’s anything you want me to gather, any presentations, any people you want me to try and get to come and present to you guys, I can, you know, work on trying to coordinate that for future meetings. It might not be the next meeting. It might be two meetings. Those are the kinds of things I want you guys to think about and reach out. You know, all of those things are stuff that we’re here to help you make sure that you can get the most information you need to make this work for you. But what topics you want to discuss, what topics you want to have on the agenda, it’s your committee.

Committee Member: It’s what… what is the council’s expectations as far as outputs from this meeting? What are they wanting to hear from us? How often are they wanting to hear from us?

Rebecca Deming: I don’t know that there was a set amount of time. I can check if the other committees how if they report out on a set number of time. I assume at least once a year would be a good idea to report out if there’s not a specific item. Like I said, when the SEPA for the SAMP comes out, having a recommendation for a response letter, those are the kinds of things when you’ll come and say, “Hey, here’s our recommended response.”

Committee Member: That’s not until October.

Rebecca Deming: You said, well, the response to our comment will be on October, but the new SEPA wouldn’t be till the new year. Well, just backing up from there, it would seem that that would be a good when they got those comments, it would be good to review them as a group.

Committee Member: Yes. As a group.

Data Requests and Future Work

Barton DeLacy: I was going to ask Jason, relative to the city, and we can go offline on this. It’d be interesting to have sort of an inventory of what statistics you might have regarding housing. You know, and even GIS if we wanted to overlay the sound… what would you call it? The sound… I don’t know what the city has. I know I use the plat viewer a lot. Yeah. But and but I don’t have access to the… I don’t have access to the contour model itself. In fact, as a private citizen, you have to pay for access to it. You can’t get it. But maybe we could get access.

Jason Woycke: Yeah. So, if we could get this would be interesting. I don’t know if you could do this and I you can overlay GIS. Yeah. If you could did that contour map over the housing map and at least initially see we could kind of see what we think and then follow on work and this could be done by a subcommittee would be to then you know figure out how many units we have in there and the population and the average home values and we could just use assessor data or something would be fine, you know, and it would give us, you know, a start and then we think that’s critically important because what I’m hearing from the as out of the part 150 study the signal seems to be look folks we’ve done all we can do with sound insulation and all that kind of stuff we’re just going to lob it over to you and it’s all going to be about zoning and zoning and urban planning to basically you know they’re just going to say, “Hey, look, don’t let anybody build inside this contour or build, you know, the type of building in there has to be compatible with this, right, no new construction and existing construction.”

Barton DeLacy: Yeah. So, I think that’s critical that we understand what they’re saying because I or what’s going the impact because I think that’s what they’re saying to us. Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, we can say fine now now then then we can start to use if we can get the metrics. Let’s look at the property tax rates. So, here are some mitigation options because we can’t do anything about the planes overhead, but if I get a my property taxes are 10% less, that’s great. And and then I with that I can start I can do the same analysis for other representative communities which would which would further demonstrate that the disproportionate you know…

Rebecca Deming: Rebecca process. See if I can get a GIS layer for it or not. If not, I can see if we can recreate it.

Jeff Bogen: May I ask has has do we have any survey data from the impacted folks directly? I know that a few of them have gone to meetings and such, but have we actually had a town meeting about that? And we have we really heard from the folks. I mean I know what my neighbors say, but it really be nice to have some sort of formal survey reach out in some way. Whether we go out and do it ourselves or just to get just to listen to people. Listen to people so I know that I’m representing them.

Joe Dusenberry: Well, we have, you know, we have the citizen advisory board and it does have representatives from each of the nine neighborhoods and we could start with those at least as a unit. Maybe they could, you know, give them…

Rebecca Deming: But we did have a community meeting in response to the SAMP where people could come out and voice their concerns, but that wasn’t probably organized either. You know, you get…

Committee Member: Yes. And then…

Rebecca Deming: That’s right. And so we didn’t collect the information. People asked some questions. The port was there, right? So but I think we could it’d be nice to have some sort of a formal survey. We say this is what the folks are concerned about. This is the survey results so we can line that up. Yeah. And use that also as pillars to support the kind of things that we are.

Joe Dusenberry: I think that’s that’s one of the reasons or one of the things I think feel strongly about is that I’m supposed to be a community representative, but in fact I talked to about a handful of people up and down my street and in my neighborhood and one of the reasons why I pushed for this committee was hopefully we can amplify that. I mean even if we just each of us just went out and talked to five or six people but I’m going to have a meeting over there. We’ll invite all the folks from our little area, 150 folks, and we’ll bring them in. We’ll collect some formal information about what really concerns you. Tell me about that. And then we can just sort of use that.

Rebecca Deming: So maybe at the next meeting I can put survey on the agenda and we can talk about survey questions that you guys would like to have and maybe even when we go out and do like we have a booth at the farmers market. It’s definitely something we can even ask while we’re out there some of those questions and then you could over if we did that then when the CAB meets it would send people out with the send people out at least alert them. It would be I mean some neighborhoods are better organized than others, but it would still be to have a vehicle for those reps to reach out and that’ll be the kind of stuff that whoever I mean our legislative leaders would love to have that kind of data.

Joe Dusenberry: I think as a committee if we can develop a message not a and the problem with this whole thing is it’s very very complicated. It gets technical in a hurry, but if we can develop a message that says this is how we are being impacted, this is what we want to do about it. And if we’re willing to go out and go to those community groups, go to the service clubs, and get out as individuals and spread this message, I think that’s how we can be the most effective because I think that there’s just generally a lack of knowledge about what’s right. A lot of people blame you know, the Port of Seattle, they blame the FAA for allowing this to happen. And it’s not just one organization. I mean, it almost has a has its own energy and has been going on and you and it’s practically unstoppable unless but what we can do is mitigate some of some of the pieces of it where we can make a difference and that might be messages to the legislature and also talking a little bit about mitigations for folks.

Rebecca Deming: What else would you like to see on the agenda next agenda?

Process Questions and Communications

Steve Reagin: Quick process question. If we do have something that we feel should come out of, you know, if we have an opinion or an observation or something that comes out of this committee, how do we communicate that to the council? Do they want to see it in a letter? Do they want somebody to come and speak to them? How do how do we want to communicate?

Rebecca Deming: She left. Well, anyway, that let me find out. I’ll pass the message along like that the idea of a survey. I’ll definitely take that to the city manager that that came out of here. And see how we how you guys want to I mean once you develop the survey is I can ask what the best way if it’s just you guys passing it on or passing it through. How he wants how let’s let’s keep it in here since he’s as a I mean if you want to talk afterwards but I’m not part…

Joe Dusenberry: Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say let’s because the community is yeah the audience is not part of this committee but let’s I will find out what the best way for recommend I mean I’m sure of whether it’s coming to the council or written recommendation we will make sure that we pass the message along in one way or another to the council. It could be through you know talk to the city manager through city manager’s report that they a specific recommendation came out of here. We’ll find a way to get those recommendations.

Committee Member: The second thing is, can you put together a little email group and send it out to us? Who’s roster?

Rebecca Deming: Yeah, with our emails. Yes, absolutely. And then I can put together an email group and then send it out to everybody and get back the suggestions for the agenda.

Rebecca Deming: Okay. Okay. Is there anything that you guys can think of right now that you would like us to start researching or anything that you could think of now? If not, you’re welcome to get it to us later. I just had it on the agenda, so I wanted to put it out there.

Additional Research Requests

Committee Member: I wouldn’t mind knowing what the city the city’s concerned, I’m sure, on SAMP issues around that. Okay. So the bigger what are the big what are the big things that the city is concerned about that perhaps we can help address or add to our understanding what some of the challenges at least so we don’t have to ask the same questions. Yeah, we can maybe present some of our response and some…

Committee Member: Is there some kind of historical record of why the last version of this committee folded like is there like a written history because I’ve heard why but I don’t know if there’s like a formalized so that we don’t again retread some of this stuff the issues that have already been gone over like I understand you know I would like to find out and I think it’s a fairly simple calculation how much tax property taxes does the port collect in the city of Des Moines…

Joe Dusenberry: Very good question. Yeah. You know, so that when we say, “Hey, I pay my taxes.” I want to be able to say exactly how much.

Rebecca Deming: Well, that is a that is kind of a complicated calculation. Because you know it’s a it’s a percentage of a percentage of a percentage and and what is that an absolute numbers and then what does that translate to, you know, per thousand of assessed value on your house? Is that something that you have any access to? I can check with our finance department. Okay. They may I might be able to just at least get the percentage or the per thousand dollar and then get a general what our assessed value in the city is. So it might be able to get a generalized to do it one time to figure out for undeveloped lots on Marine View Drive. What is what you know what could they be assessed at? What are they assessed at? How much how much difference does that make to the to the city? And it’s a it’s a I think it’s like the city gets something like $80 maybe of million dollar assessed value.

This it filters down. It’s not a big number. We might be able to get like that number and then say our total assessed value in the entire city is this amount. So we might be able to get a get a very small fraction and that’s why you know trying to find ways and a lot of the city property isn’t even assessed you know so that doesn’t help and and then we have these shortfalls you know so this could go to mitigate that yeah anything else if not I’m happy to adjourn.

Meeting Adjournment

Rebecca Deming: Okay we’ll get back in time tune in to the to the committee meeting and and hear the technical review committee or presentation also that’s in yes the START went on is going in at five o’clock so oh sorry they gotta they’ve got to take off where is that meeting or you zoom online it is okay.

Committee Member: I’m old school so… Is this something that we anybody can zoom in on or is it is it…

Jason Woycke: I don’t think the working groups are not open to the public.

Committee Member: Okay. All right. We’ll see you the second Monday at 4:00 pm next month here. I guess I should have checked the date. Whatever that is.

Rebecca Deming: Thank you. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks everyone.

 

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¹This is a machine-generated transcript generated on the fly by Google/Youtube/AI. Accuracy totally not guaranteed. Provided only as a convenience and to help people with disabilities. Caveat lector!