Burien, Des Moines, SeaTac file petition to review SAMP

On the last day of the sixty day deadline, the Three City ILA filed a  Petition for Review in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the venue which typically reviews FAA decisions in Washington State.

The petition asks the court to consider the September 24 Sustainable Airport Finding of No Significant Impacts/Record of Decision (ROD) approving thirty one projects, including changes to the airfield, terminal, new gates, cargo facilities, roadway modifications, parking structures, fuel storage and support buildings.

The Environmental Assessment (EA) concluded the work would not cause significant impacts to air quality, noise, water, wetlands, cultural resources or surrounding land uses when mitigation is applied. This image should provide a partial understanding of why so many new flights could be considered insignificant. The blue boundary is known as the Area Of Potential Effect. Impacts outside that perimeter, essentially the airport property, were not taken into account.

Two confusing processes in one

The SAMP NEPA process is mandatory and includes a noise component.  However, concurrently, the Port conducted a voluntary, but separate legal process called Part 150–including separate community outreach.

Part 150 establishes noise boundaries known as the DNL65 (the area in red) and determines who can obtain sound insulation. The results of that Part 150 were used as the noise component of the SAMP. Combining both processes is very typical for airport expansions to avoid duplicate effort.

Although the EA/Part 150 says that the SAMP will slightly expand that DNL65 (likely by as few as a dozen new homes), overall it claims that this will not increase noise levels above what is known as the threshold of significance (1.5dB.)

The only required mitigations in the ROD, which the Port of Seattle has already agreed to, are about $40,000,000 in traffic mitigation at eight intersections in SeaTac and Burien.

Analysis

This is not a law suit. It was the absolute minimum action required to keep any federal appeal open for consideration. Although the City of SeaTac has formally budgeted $350,000, and Burien and Des Moines have agreed to a cost-sharing plan, the expected costs for this specific action are likely only $15,000.

If anything, it should be seen more like filing for an extension to turn in one’s term paper or filing a tax return. There are currently no specific harms being alleged or relief being requested. It is an inexpensive way to buy time to prepare a case.

Cities will now have another sixty days to decide their next steps. Given that there is so little available information as to what they are objecting to, or the relief they are expecting, it is hard to say what those might be.

Timeline

Everything concerning  every airports, especially the law, is complicated. To help explain how we got here and keep readers up to speed we’ve established a separate SAMP Timeline which we will be referring to frequently as events proceed.

The timeline begins in 2032 and ends in 2008, which may seem odd at first. But the expansion now known as ‘the SAMP’ was publicly announced in 2012–only four years after the Third Runway opened. The 2025 ROD being reviewed by the court is only phase one of a two-phase project, that is why it is referred to as Near Term Projects/NTP. There is already a Long Term Projects/LTP scheduled to begin in 2032 which is already planned, but not under consideration. It will never end.