Topic: Discussion of STNI letter regarding committee work plan
machine-generated**Joe Dusenberry:** No worries. You’re right on time. It’s three o’clock. Okay. Um Jason, should we — we’ve got a quorum? Should we get started or you want to wait a couple more minutes and see if someone else shows up? Looks like Steve is on.
**Jason Woycke:** Oh, okay. Perfect. I think this is it, Joe.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. Okay. I don’t know about Todd. I thought I — the last communication I read he was going to be able to make it, but why don’t we go ahead and get started? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, we’ll call the meeting to order. This is a special meeting, so I don’t think we have — uh on the agenda. Jason, do we have any approval of minutes or anything like that or we just have the one order of business? Uh Jason, you might be muted. Oh yeah, Jason’s muted. Yeah.
**Jason Woycke:** Okay. Uh yeah, the agenda is uh called to order. Roll call. And then agenda items. Item one.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Got it. Okay. Roll call. I’m here. Barton, Jeff, uh Steve, are you there? Yeah. Steve, you’re uh muted.
**Steve Reagin:** I am here.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. All right. There’s four of us here. Let the minutes show that four of us are here and the uh agenda item is — we wanted to discuss the letter from STNI. I will just kick it off. I sent out a response. I titled it a response. I started out to just write a paragraph or two about my general impressions on the — or my general thoughts about the letter. There was several things there. So, I decided to just take it one paragraph at a time and break it down that way. But what I sent out to you are just my thoughts and comments. It’s not in any way a draft letter or response. It’s just my thoughts and comments. So, today if we could maybe just talk about the letter, get all of you to kind of pitch in and let’s talk about what your responses to the letter are, see if we can come up with a common theme, and then we have to figure out how we’re going to respond and who’s going to do that. So, Barton, do you want to go first?
**Barton DeLacy:** Sure. Um, number one, I think he did a great job of summarizing her points of view. The major — you know, she — there’s a dispute about makeup of the commission. She’s got some — I think you did a good job of countering her arguments and there’s some areas of commonality that are also real important to express. I really liked her characterization of our START committee as a casino, a game meant to be played but not won. And I think that was well stated and it’s better than my “Hallelujah Chorus” slide. So anyway I like that. So I don’t know Joe, I think we should start with the areas of agreement and you know, I think that certainly strengthens our document that we put together and then we can discuss the areas where she takes issue with us.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. Uh Jeff?
**Jeffrey Bogen:** I think the overall — I think we need to decide one, why we’re responding directly to this, and what the level of appropriate response would be. Going paragraph by paragraph is certainly one effective approach. But overall I think that it’s surprising that we have a three-page report back from STNI on wanting to enlarge our participation and I think that has provided an opportunity to listen to all of their concerns around the efforts that we’re trying to put in as an advisory council. And so we are simply an advisory council and I think that finding and defining our mission statement has been a moving target.
And not surprisingly, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think that everybody on this team has had an opportunity to come up to speed on the critical issues that we face here in the Des Moines area and throughout the region about what are the challenges for our community here. And as we define what’s important, we’re beginning to find out what the folks think about, what some of the complaints are about, what our surrounding communities are thinking, what the national perspectives are. And so no surprise that we’ve changed our direction a little bit on areas where we didn’t think we could really do something and focus on the areas where we really do think that we can make a difference. And I think that really the focus should be — our response to the letter, really, I think they want us to be you know, Des Moines centric. In other words, let’s get on with making sure that we are providing the right level of advice to the council on issues that are big challenges for Des Moines and stay out of those national issues.
Um, I myself am getting tired of hearing the word casino and game. I find that tedious. And a little bit too light-hearted for me. It’s much more than a game. I appreciate the anecdotal piece of it, but I don’t see it like that at all. So, and I think your response is more appropriate — that it’s true. We’ve drawn the same conclusions. We’re just not calling it a game. We are challenged to make any substantive change at all, particularly at the national level. But your point about participating in the larger community to affect both local and national efforts, and our collaboration with a larger group which collaborates with other national groups — with Noise, Quiet Skies, the FAA national issues on the development of new noise regulations. I think we should continue to stay engaged on those things and continue to link up with the national efforts. The Port is connected but not the way we should be connected.
I think we have a different mission. I think Des Moines — the whole point of the advisory committee is also to incorporate all the good ideas that we’re getting from our surrounding communities and use that as leverage to make some changes, and not give up and not throw in the towel. And I’m really unclear about what STNI is expecting us to do. You know, simply defining what compensation means and making that a year effort, which is what one of the paragraphs suggests, I don’t think is productive at that level. So I really do think we should participate in a broader effort and stay connected. I think we do have leverage there. I think the only way we’re going to change national law is to be part of a larger community and stay engaged with our ILA cities and continue to get feedback from our Des Moines citizens about what’s important. So, I do want to pursue things like surveys and education in a different way than STNI does it for the feedback to the city.
So, I do think we should go over — I see you’ve numbered every paragraph. Yeah. And I do think it’s worthwhile going over each piece to make sure we are all aligned with the general feedback about your comments on each one, which was a great effort. So, thank you so very much for putting that together. And I don’t have any particular challenges. I do — I kind of get excited about noise issues and changing the Quiet Skies time, and I think we’re in great agreement with STNI about that and doing that. And also I think we should make more efforts on the national level to get a different DNL metric and look at more absolute noises and unfiltered noises and things like that. I think STNI is all about that as well. I think they appreciate that. You can hear it in their presentations. So I’m good with all those. And I do think that we should try to get elected officials on board, and the Port of Seattle should be one component of that, and the ILA cities should be another, along with their other um that are working on health and noise issues around the greater Seattle area.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. Uh Steve, your thoughts?
**Steve Reagin:** I appreciate — my thoughts are along with Jeff’s. I appreciate the work that STNI put in there. They’re one of many of our constituents, right? And there’s some knowledge there, but I also found parts of the feedback very cynical and very defeatist. And I can understand being beaten up by the Third Runway issues years ago, but you know, we’re trying to affect change here. And saying things aren’t worth it — I just found it very cynical. But thanks for the feedback. It’s one part of the feedback and then we, you know, to add in with feedback that we get from other constituents that we have, right?
I do agree with some of the comments about doing more about the noise and not giving up. I don’t want to give up on that. But also we have to understand that we are a small player in this and that we have to have cooperation with the folks around us, with the cities, with the legislature, with our — you know, yes, have our elected representatives to the federal government been extremely helpful in this? Not really. What do we need to do in conjunction with our other partners to change that, right? We cannot give up on that because us by ourselves — that’s how the — I don’t want to say that’s how the Port gets around being able to be responsive, by us not being on the same page.
I had maybe some further thoughts since — I mean in terms of a response. I had some further thoughts after I sat down and came up with my responses, specific responses. But I think it’s important at this point also to clearly define the roles, the players and the roles that we’ve got going. We have the ILA cities and with their city managers and their staff — Jason and Rebecca and the staff at the city — they are working on the mitigation ask. You know, that portion of it is being dealt with by that group and their consultants, for one thing.
The other thing is I think we need to clearly state somehow that there’s a difference between the START committee and the Airport Advisory Committee. The START committee — Barton and I are community representatives. We were appointed some time ago by the council to be representatives to the START roundtable. The Airport Advisory Committee is also appointed by the council but it was with a little bit different charge. In other words, we’re there to advise the council on airport issues. And there is some overlap obviously because Barton and I are on the committee and we’re also our START reps. But at this point, what we’ve done is — the draft that we’ve brought back to the Airport Advisory Committee is essentially some work done by the START community representatives. It wasn’t work done by the committee.
So I think we have to clearly say to STNI, look, this draft at this point is not a committee work product. What the START representatives — six of them, you know, two from us, two from Burien, and two from SeaTac — are asking the Airport Advisory Committee to do is basically endorse this work product that we’ve come forward with reorganizing the START. So I think somehow Jason, in the letter we need to clearly state, you know, what everybody’s roles are and where we are in the process. Because I think there’s just a little bit of confusion in STNI’s letter about who’s doing what and what we are actually asking the Airport Advisory Committee to do.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Yeah. And don’t you — I got the sense that the letter was addressing our requests for a change in addition to our yearly work plan. Yeah. And so this is an internal work plan for the advisory committee. And STNI, a venerable group, but certainly I don’t think they should be — they specifically addressed what they didn’t want us to do, which was really the basis of the addition to our work plan. And then they have all this other stuff. And I’m not sure we need to respond to all this other stuff and put on and become public and say yes, we agree with this. No, we don’t agree with this. Yes, we agree with that. I think we should probably stick to the work plan that changed. That’s their comment to us. And then we’ll present our work plan to the council, and they can use this letter as feedback, as they use other letters, to determine what they would like us to work on. I think they’re looking to us actually to provide them with a work plan that is aligned to them. But I think they’re looking for us to unfold a little bit more — this is what we’ve come up with. And I think we should proceed forward with trying to ensure that we get that message up to them and see how they feel.
**Steve Reagin:** Yeah. Well, I agree that we need a concise response. I think clearly define what the roles are. And we also need to clearly define — or it seems to me like they spent a lot of time trying to talk us into working on the ask, on what we want. Well, we’ve got a whole group working on that aspect of it. I personally — when I’m thinking about reorganizing the START roundtable, I’m thinking more long term. I mean, there’s the immediate thing in front of us. The SAMP is obviously what we’re going to be talking about in one way or another this year. But as that whole plan rolls out, it’s going to take a decade. And we just need — my whole idea behind reorganizing the START is that we just need a more representative, responsive body to deal with these issues as they roll out over the next decade. And I think that somehow needs to be stated in our response also — that this isn’t just this specific issue. We want to have a more responsive, more inclusive START with decision makers in on the discussion, because we know that over the next 10 years change pretty dramatic.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Yeah. And I do think we should not respond back with a three-page response. I think it should be quite concise, just as it lines up to our — reiterate why we want to change the work plan. Restate it. And some of the words you put together pretty nicely. And I don’t think we need to hit every single paragraph, agree or not agree. They have many great ideas. STNI is filled with different ideas and they certainly do a good job of presenting them to the public in their own fashion. But it’s different than our charge I think.
**Barton DeLacy:** So what — go ahead.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Okay.
**Barton DeLacy:** Um, so I like your context. The START — our role there is to affiliate with other airport efforts, identify best practices, Safe Skies, that kind of thing. And to have more clout is why we need an expanded — some kind of expanded membership with electeds on it, as you’ve identified. And then our — this committee, as I understand it, was kind of created ad hoc to really just get us through the SAMP process. You know, and we may hang around but that’s the initial task. And I think our concerns there are that the environmental review has failed to consider certain things that we think they should, and that’s may or may not — and I like your — and then the third area, we have raised issues of compensation and mitigation, but I think we simply say we’ll for the time being defer to the ILA, so as not to be at cross purposes.
**Steve Reagin:** Yeah. I — this is also — I went to the Burien airport advisory committee meeting last night and this was a common topic was — hey, this is a huge issue. This is going to roll out over a long period of time, or at least you know the SAMP — workable pieces. So that one, we’ve got consultants who are going to get down to the very technical responses to the SEA. But how do we go about — you know, even talking to the Burien airport committee, their discussion was, well, what is our role going to be? And really what they’re talking about more is that whole public outreach thing like you were talking about, Jeff, about the surveying and getting people aware of what these changes are going to be. And so as things roll out, there’s going to be things for us to do, and hopefully they all fit within our work plan as written right now. I think they probably will, but it’s a little hard to say right now exactly what we’re going to end up focusing our time on.
The idea of the START reorganization is just — and I mentioned this at the Burien meeting last night — is hey, this came up because we were exposed to this Roundtable of Roundtables. And we just started talking to people and we looked at this and we say, “Hey, we are a one-off. We are so different in our makeup and our reach, our geographic reach and the membership, from all the other what I call high-impact airports — the ones that have major impacts on the area around them, the communities around them.” I said, “We are so different, you know, and how did this end up this way?” And we understand that the roundtables are not meant to be decision-making bodies. They’re really basically places where the communities around airports come to get information about the airport. But the people that are at the roundtables need to be people who can go back to their decision-making policy organizations and make decisions. Because that seems to be what is missing — is that there’s no way to make a decision at START that has any impact on, like you said Jeff, on the quality of our lives here in Des Moines.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Yeah, I think — you know, I think the things that we need to pay attention to are how it is that SAMP’s going to roll out, how it is in general — the larger issues about the increased capacity and the effects of noise and traffic on our community — needs to be related back to the council so that they’re aware of things that might be impacting them, so they can make decisions around zoning issues. And we have on our team a real estate expert. We have with due — an FAA expert. But we’re all separate experts in our field, business expertise. But we need to — we can’t leverage all that unless we have community folks. And I think our role too is to, you know, as we go through this SAMP, is kind of reading between the lines. What aren’t we being — what’s there that’s not being highlighted? What’s there that we think is being missed? And what can we present to the city council as actionable?
**Steve Reagin:** Yeah. And I think as things roll out also, like I said, there will be a highly detailed response from our consultants. But what will really have an impact, and may even be a greater impact, is our voices. You know, the people that live under — the people that live here with the emissions, with the noise. And that’s what one of our focuses should be as things roll out. We should be going to these meetings and talking to the decision makers and saying, “Hey, we understand that you can go to the airport and get this information, but you need to hear it from — you need to hear our voices.” The Port of Seattle is a separate organization and they have a commission that is responsible for running that. But speaking to our elected representatives, I said, you have responsibility to us citizens of King County, whether we’re the citizens of Des Moines, citizens of King County, or the citizens of the state of Washington. You have a responsibility to take care of us. The Port of Seattle is a thing, not people.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Yeah. Listen, I really think paragraph 25 — you know, asks two things as a conclusion to their paper. “The committee — I urge the committee not to bring this draft to council on June 11th until the contradiction between page five and six is resolved.” There’s quite a bit on page five and six, but I think that’s just basically — they’re just saying that they don’t think that the broader representation as we’ve proposed it will be effective, and they want to use empirical evidence to prove that it is effective. And I don’t think we have to go down that argument at all. Having a broader coalition of collaborative folks makes all the sense in the world and will not distract us. In fact, it will give us better ideas and better feedback to the city of Des Moines. I think that’s what we need to say just really clearly and succinctly, and we could wrap that up in two paragraphs.
**Steve Reagin:** Yeah, I agree with that.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** And then the city council can decide if they think that’s right. And if they say no go — hey, we’ll just continue on. I would ask them to provide us some more feedback about what the things that they would like to see us do. I mean, we’ve developed our own work plan, but we’ve had very little feedback from them about what they would like us to do. And I think they’re waiting for us to give — you know, it’s not — I don’t think — it’d be great to hear from them. But I don’t think they’re going to be asking in a form of paragraph 25. I think they would like us to attend to some of these matters that we’ve already put into our work plan, and this additional one can only make us better. And I think that’s what we should focus our response on — in a very short paragraph letter back. Back to I guess it goes back to Paula?
**Joe Dusenberry:** Is that really what you’re gonna — is that — well back the city or us, or well — Jason, we got to get you involved in this discussion. Start with who is going to respond to the letter? And you’ve heard us all talk about it and we’ve written some things down and sent them in. Who is going to write the letter? How are we going to respond to that? I’ve asked Rebecca to bump us out a week or so in June. One, I’m just going to run out of time because I’ve got to go to — I’m going to be out of town the 26th through the 4th. But the other thing is I don’t want this STNI — I think I really would like to see this settled, you know, that we get our response out there and it’s had time for everybody to to take a look at it. And what I would really like to do is avoid a kind of a discussion when we get in front of the city council. I don’t want to talk about — I mean we could just go down this rabbit hole and spend the whole evening — our whole allotted time talking about why, you know, this letter. I don’t want to do that. I think when we get there I would like to have this issue past us somehow.
**Jason Woycke:** Yeah, that makes sense. I can discuss with Rebecca what she thinks about that. I’m not sure — I’m thinking from a standpoint of where we get public comments where we would respond directly to the applicants, but or the commenters, but in this situation, I’m not sure. So, I’ll check on that.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Well, so anyway, have we talked about this enough? Jason, do you have a sense of where we are on this? And I think we all have kind of general agreement on the tone and the brevity of response.
**Jason Woycke:** Yeah. No, I understand where you’re at. I feel like you’ll have to draft a response at some point. I don’t think it’s staff that’ll be doing that.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay.
**Jason Woycke:** But I can double check that with Rebecca.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Well, I would have time, but like I said, I’ve got — we’re leaving town next Tuesday. But between now and then, I could certainly work on a draft and get that circulated so we could at least start working on that. But again I wouldn’t have enough time to put together the council presentation because I think that needs to be a slightly different focus there.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Well a lot — the focus is going to be a lot different. Yeah. Completely different.
**Joe Dusenberry:** All right. Yeah. So anyway, we could leave it at that. I could take a cut at it and circulate it and we could edit and cut and paste and edit and see what we come up with. How’s that?
**Jeffrey Bogen:** That sounds good. I think that’s the plan.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. All right. I’ll try to get something — let’s see what’s today. Wednesday. Thursday, Friday — maybe Friday close of business get something back to everyone. How’s that? And at least get started on a draft.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Sounds good.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. Oh, Todd, have you —
**Todd:** I’ve been listening.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Oh, okay.
**Todd:** You all — yeah. You know, and I had a thought, too. The letter that we got was kind of more focused towards the START than us. So, I think our response should just be — you should pass your information along to the START council because it doesn’t really affect us.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Yeah. Yeah. And it’s interesting. I actually saw in their letter talking about how ineffective it is to have political figures on your council. And your experience from the Roundtable of Roundtables kind of shows that once you get some buy-in from some higher-level political figures, you get a little bit more movement and there’s some accountability there, in a way that — you know, you feel like people have been ineffectual on our behalf, but if you put them under the spotlight, like, maybe people will pay attention. Where maybe they will feel a little bit of heat on them. And so I thought that was a really good part of your response to that letter. Or if we’re going to angle it in any way, I think that’s a good way to put it.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. All right. Well, Todd, I’ll just start a draft and I’ll start sending it around and we can add, subtract, edit, modify, whatever, and try to get something back maybe by first part of the week. I’d like to get it back to you, Jason, and Rebecca, before I leave town next Tuesday. That would be good. Although we will be in touch by email but I’ll be gone until the 4th.
**Jason Woycke:** Okay. Yeah. Hopefully before Tuesday. Yeah. Quick.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. All right. Everybody on board with that?
**Jeffrey Bogen:** Yeah. Everybody — weekend? Okay. Yeah, that’d be good. We’ll give you feedback on it. Again, I think you pretty much in your response, you’ve already almost answered the kind of things I think should be — just — all right. So, expand it into two paragraphs. Succinct, brief, to the point.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Exactly. Yeah. I struggle with that sometimes.
**Jeffrey Bogen:** I’ll help edit. I’ll be around through — I’ll pull some words out.
**Barton DeLacy:** Yeah. Me, too. I’m out of town. Same time you are, Joe.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. All right. Well, we’ll get it done. Jason, sounds like we’ve ground this into a fine powder. So, we’ll just get to work on it.
**Jason Woycke:** So, yeah, get to work on it and I’ll discuss with Rebecca and get back to you.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. And I just need to finalize that — my request to bump that council presentation out a week or so if we can. July is getting — August is impossible and July is difficult. But have you — is Rebecca aware of this?
**Jason Woycke:** Yeah. Yeah, I talked to her.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. You know how happy they are when we change the schedule, or unhappy they are, but we’ll just have to deal with it. Because I think the idea was we had to have that by — I’m going to be back on the fourth, but apparently sixth I think. Yeah. I don’t have enough time to put the council presentation together even though our meeting isn’t until the — is that correct? There was some other reason why it all had to be done by the end of the month.
**Jason Woycke:** Get it into their packet. Yeah, there’s a — they’ve made it difficult.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Yeah, got it. Okay. All right. Well, we’ll get to work. Motion to adjourn.
**Speaker:** So moved.
**Joe Dusenberry:** Okay. Moved and seconded. We’re adjourned. All right. Thanks. Thanks everybody. Happy Memorial Day everyone.
**Multiple speakers:** Thank you. Yeah. Hey, have a nice weekend. Thanks, Jason. Okay.
This 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!
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!