I attended this event hosted by Congressman Adam Smith, State Senator Karen Keiser, Representative Tina Orwall, Port Commissioner Hamdi Mohamed.
I counted about 50 people in attendance.
It provided a short overview of the current state of legislation at the Federal, State and Port level on aviation issues and then moved into about a 90 minute community listening session.
I particularly want to applaud Port Commissioner Hamdi Mohamed. Frankly, it was a lot easier for the other electeds on that stage to take questions. After all, they don’t run an airport. 😀 Below are some highlights, important topics and some overall thoughts on the state of aviation activism around Sea-Tac Airport.
Video
Highlights
North Sea-Tac Park and Tree Cover
Congressman Smith announced he would be attempting get some form of protection concerning North Sea-Tac Park written into the 2023 FAA Reauthorization Update. No details, but it’s likely to mean that the FAA will create some form of exception from Section 163. Long story short: traditionally, all the ‘noise lands’ bought with FAA money (including North Sea-Tac Park and the Des Moines Creek Business Park) are supposed to remain in the possession of the airport operator and their use has to be approved by the FAA. Here is a 1990 memo from the FAA on that concerning NSTP.
One audience member was almost to tears with a very sobering follow-up comment on tree cover. In the grand scheme of things, it is actually relatively easy for the Port (and Rep. Smith) to set aside a part of that land in perpetuity and call that a ‘win’. Unfortunately, it distracts attention from the 20,000+ trees that have been removed as part of airport and highway expansion since the Third Runway. The net loss of trees should be garnering more attention. Consider how much work it has taken local activists just to avoid losing more trees. We don’t mean to sound unappreciative. But calling the preservation of 55 acres a major ‘community win’ just demonstrates how far our expectations have been lowered.
Tricorders?
I made a very ‘in the weeds’ comment about air quality monitoring and the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency map directly to those electeds, which I doubt most of the audience followed.
But this is one of STNI’s current and biggest goals. If you’ve ever seen these sorts of maps they always show green around Sea-Tac (which means ‘good’), And that is because those sensors do not register aviation emissions. We cannot manage aviation emissions until we are at least properly measuring them Explainer here.
Capacity?
One audience member astutely pointed out that the Port (and the PSRC’s) Demand Forecasts have always been ginned up. The term the PSRC uses is ‘unconstrained demand’ which represents sales goals not true ‘demand’. Unconstrained Demand is the number the industry wants to achieve. And all of us tend to take those numbers as a given because the growth of the airline industry is considered to be an intrinsic good. We still hear, even from members of various ‘Quiet Skies’ groupsthat ‘of course, the industry must grow’.
I pushed Commissioner Mohamed a little bit (which I kinda feel bad about) for a statement she made that there was nothing the airport could do about growth. She was simply reiterating something she will hear from her staff all the time and that was the only reason I mentioned it in public.
The airport can do something. They really can write a letter to the FAA saying,
“According to your own most recent capacity guidelines, we’re full, and we’ve decided to stop building to accommodate more growth. Sorry.”
Obviously that sounds about as realistic to most people as launching nuclear war. Because even today, limiting growth in any way is unthinkable, even to most people who say they despise the airport. It is still so ingrained in our being we can’t even imagine saying “No.” Ever. That psychology needs some tweaking.
Second Airport
Senator Keiser gave the bad news that the Second Airport committee known as the CACC had ended in failure.
For the residents of Thurston and Pierce Counties, the CACC really was an emergency. And they responded like it was an emergency. But the thing is, there was never much (for them) to worry about. They likely don’t want to hear anyone minimize their great efforts so soon after the victory lap.
But the fact is, the second airport discussion comes around every decade or so and it never goes anywhere. It’s a (painful) formality the State goes through in order to say, “Gosh, we tried!” (see 1989 Flight Plan) and then go on to build a Third Runway. The SAMP will play out exactly the same.
The failure of the whole second airport discussion, should be a wake-up call for us. There will be no ‘relief’. The airport expansion known as the SAMP isn’t ‘coming’, it’s mostly done.
In other words, in a normal environmental review process, the review happens before the projects get built. The projects comprising the SAMP, are already being built and are, in fact, nearing completion. So the review will not ‘stop’ anything. At best it will be a negotiation over what mitigation to provide. Going back to the Third Runway, after a decade of court fights, the public received very little remediation. Imagine how much less we will receive negotiating on something that has already been built.
So, other than the one bit of good news re. NSTP, there was no good news of any kind, certainly none concerning strategic planning.
Analysis: This is an emergency?
To our minds, we have a much tougher row to hoe than the ‘second airport people’. We have to learn to live with something we don’t want to live with.
The problem with Sea-Tac Airport is that for us it hasn’t really been an ’emergency’ since about 1970.
As much as residents like to reminisce about the past, the Third Runway ‘fight’ was not as big and as unanimous as people like to think. It was fought almost exclusively by people who had something personal to lose. Much of the community already living under the two existing runways was less engaged for two reasons
- Many still worked in aviation and felt that growth was good (or at least inevitable.)
- Most had gotten used to suffering with the other two runways. Many thought a new runway might actually ease their burden. (Sharing the pain equitably–ironically something you hear people say today when they want the planes to go somewhere else.)
The uncomfortable truth is that airport activism has, to date, often been not much more than a NIMBY movement. Most people do not tend to get exercised over ‘aviation impacts’ writ large–until the airplanes start going over their head. And so they make exactly the same arguments that every homeowner makes when an unpleasant re-zone occurs: the character of the neighborhood will change… We were promised…
That is why the traditional response has been “Move”. Don’t like the schools? Lost your view? New planes flying over head? Hey, quit complaining. Just. move. All the concerns of individual homeowners, not people concerned about the long term viability of a community.
Because of this dynamic, decision makers often see these religious conversions with a degree of cynicism.
Just a few ideas on the table in 1975
Another audience member also got way into the weeds on some small (but very meaningful) engineering tweaks that could make existing aircraft quieter. Great idea. What the audience member probably did not know is that regulations such as ‘requiring airlines to update their fleet with the latest, affordable noise reducing hardware’ came very close to occurring almost five decades ago. Other discussion items way back when:
- Glide slope
- Ongoing aircraft noise and emission reduction standards
- Air quality monitoring network
- Revenue sharing
- Impact fees
- Air filter and HVAC with sound insulation
- Improved runway procedures
- Late night runway limits
- Ongoing environmental remediation
- Land use
- Multi-modal transit (light rail)
Sound vaguely familiar? Every idea being discussed today was actually closer to reality in 1975. But because all anyone could ever seem to maintain focus on was ‘making the planes go somewhere else’, we achieved almost none of them. And the ones we did get–like the ‘late night voluntary limit’ are trotted out as some ‘innovation’.
(For example, if we’d had that air quality monitoring network, we would now be able to regulate aviation emissions. As we say, no data, no problem.)
So you have a chronic condition…
Unfortunately, soon after the Sea-Tac Communities Plan was adopted in 1976, people drifted back to exactly the bad habits we have today. It’s like the guy who survives the major heart attack, adjusts his lifestyle for a while, then gradually the treadmill becomes a coat rack, moves out to the garage and finally he forgets what even happened. So 45 years on, we’re even sicker than before.
All the energy spent on ‘making the planes go somewhere else‘ is largely what has prevented us from obtaining relief.
As tortured as this will sound:
If everyone who focuses on their flight paths could instead focus more on things that are more easily achievable, we’d actually make the progress necessary to change those flight paths.
That was the original intent of the Sea-Tac Communities Plan. In effect, let’s manage this as a community, like a chronic condition, instead of fighting individual battles we almost never win.
The meeting represented the airport community in microcosm. A lot of chronic upset. Not many wins. But down deep, for many people, the situation is still about “making the planes go somewhere else” rather than doing the work we could have been doing for the past 45 years.
Senator Keiser pointed out that there must be community activism, which is 100%. But the group she referred to was CASE, organized to fight the Third Runway. CASE accomplished some great things, but delaying the Third Runway for eight years was not their big ‘win’.
Actually, the delays were the result of groups like CASE working to force the Port, after 50 years, to finally clean up its toxic waste water; thus saving the entire creek system and making the Des Moines Creek Trail possible. That was huge. But since that was not the original goal, as soon as the runway got built, the group dissolved. Imagine what could have been accomplished if that kind of talent had found a way to keep going and tackle some of these other goals?
New blood
If you looked across that audience, most of the people are exhausted, frustrated, complacent, and frankly old. There were very few people under the age of 60. And many of them likely feel that ‘resistance is futile’.
That probably sounds harsh, but that kind of energy is not what creates change.
And it’s also not the correct lesson to take away from this meeting. The issue has never been whether or not we can effect positive change. We definitely can. Groups like CASE proved it!
The question has always been: how do you get people to treat our situation more like a serious, but treatable chronic condition, rather than as individual battles to ‘make the planes go somewhere else’. In short, how do you create a movement like CASE, one that accomplishes big things, but with a motivation other than ‘making the planes go somewhere else!’?
CASE may not have been the best example, but Senator Keiser offered the exactly the right solution: community action. However, we feel that it will take a new attitude, a new generation of people, with the energy to resume the path we never should have left. People who are committed to improving the entire area rather than their individual spot. People who will not listen to “Just move.” People willing to elect leaders unwilling to sacrifice environment and health in exchange for false promises of ‘the economic engine’. People willing to finally accomplish all the long range goals we abandoned decades ago.
How do we recruit those people? How do we get the next generation, people who are raising their children here, to see that Town Hall and these issues as being at least as important in their day as a PTA meeting or taking their kids to soccer practice.
That’s the real challenge.