The Airport Communities Podcast
We open this week’s episode by talking about how little information sharing there ever really is among any airport community. Even candidate forums on airport issues here are now semi-private!
More broadly, we at Sea-Tac are not alone with airport expansions. But on the plus side, more and more, we’re noticing other airport communities using our resources. Which is great! Traditionally, almost no airport communities share information–except on some very broad federal legislation that never goes anywhere.
To help everyone, we continuing to experiment with ways to make it easier to search our database. (Among other things the new Studies and Airport Law Cheat Sheet pages.)
We began as just a bunch of old nerds trying to collect data, not only the things everyone obsesses over (flight paths, noise levels) but politics, socioeconomics, and especially history. Once we understood how bad FAA law is, we wanted to understand why there had been so little local opposition to that law–other than just ‘flight paths’.
Much of it comes down to that lack of information sharing. There’s no Yelp for airport communities. That is why there has been such a thriving market for airport consultants and people doing the wrong things over and over.
Last week we considered a story so crazy it could be a made-for-tv movie. How the Sea-Tac Communities Plan, which, among other things, was supposed to provide open space around the west side of the airport, immediately devolved into Boeing’s search for a new headquarters, angry homeowners fighting back, NEPA version one, zoning and ultimately, the Third Runway.
This week we tell a story just as crazy, but with a much happier ending. And one which we hope helps explain a little why people have been making so many of the same mistakes since.
The first billion dollar drug was Tagamet, a drug created to address ulcers, a chronic disease you don’t often hear about now because after wasting so much money addressing the problem in exactly the wrong way, people finally started doing so in the right way. Once a problem goes away, it’s amazing how quickly it fades from memory.
Along came Barry Marshall, an Australian researcher who found the real cause by intentionally giving himself an ulcer to prove his point.
There are easier ways to win a Nobel Prize, but few more useful. His stunt saved hundreds of thousands of people from needless suffering and ended the waste of billions of dollars.
For decades, residents in airport communities have been focusing more on immediate relief than getting to root causes and long term solutions. It’s hard to tell people who are suffering they’re wasting their money. They’re desperate, after all. But that is part of the reason why we keep reaching for Tagamet and leaving the disease unchecked.
But one lesson we’ve taken from airport advocacy since the 1970’s has been how increasingly focused everyone became on blaming the FAA for everything. But a lot of the decisions that made airport expansion possible–including the Westside Hilltop Survival Committee– were encouraged by your local electeds.
“No politician will tell you they support noise and pollution.” But time after time, it wasn’t the FAA, or even the Port of Seattle, that often chose (and continue to choose) “jobs and growth” over your community’s health and well-being. Regardless of what people say, how they vote is what they really believe. And it is that, as much as the FAA, that made expansion possible. If your own electeds did not say ‘no’, or even encourage research into other possible solutions, why should anyone else?
If you remain skeptical, we encourage you to share information on your community’s airport expansion. What was the outcome from your consultants? The way we end all the skepticism, and all the Tagamet, is by sharing our experiences, our data, our outcomes, and doing the real research we should have been doing all along. If we had, we’d be at the right place now.
Solve for Sea-Tac. Solve for every airport.
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Have you considered WHY something might be posted as a ‘private’ event?
Yes, of course. If you haven’t, we hope you will listen to the complete episode. We understand concerns that some people feel uneasy in *any* public gathering. Nevertheless, we see less and less of our State electeds with each passing year. After the Third Runway, a few Port Comms felt obligated to check in with airport communities. We haven’t seen any of them in years–outside of ‘planting events’ and this *one* campaign stop. This cycle was your event. The last cycle was a senior living community. Rarely are these recorded. Every candidate says encouraging things to a handful of people. This state of affairs makes it impossible to build larger advocacies–or hold electeds to account. Ryan Calkins made a very true statement at your event: he gets very few emails. None of them get more than a smattering of outreach on airport impacts. That is the problem: the majority of residents have ‘settled’.
Thank you so much for your work.