Des Moines Airport Advisory Committee Meeting

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Roll here. First agenda item is approval of the minutes. Everybody get a chance to take a look at the minutes from the last time? Got a motion to approve.

MEMBER: Motion to approve.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Second? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Staff, did we get any complaints or communications from anybody?

DEMING: We did not receive any new communications. However, at the February meeting, you guys were looking at a document that talked about the port complaints and asked about me putting in a public records request. So, I put in the formal public records request and we have started to receive some of that data. As it comes in, I’ll ensure that gets to you guys. However, we have not received any direct complaints to us and there’s probably no one here that can just pull out the things we want out of all that.

I can talk to the city manager about what kind of staff time we can put towards it, but frankly, I haven’t even looked at it yet. I just saw that it was like thousands of names and I thought, how am I going to do this? So, I’ll look at it some more.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: We just need an answer to that anomaly — that we have a very small number of people that complain a whole bunch of times. We’re kind of an outlier in those reports because there are definitely ways to search for repeat names.

DELACY: I’ll take a look. I haven’t had a chance to look at that, but I will go through it. If I can drop it in a spreadsheet or something, I can work through that.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: These monthly reports they give us — we’re always near the top in the number of complaints, but we have a very small number of origination of the complaint. In other words, you have about 10 or 11 people that complain hundreds of times in a month.

DELACY: Got it. Okay. I’ll throw it in a pivot table or something, see if I can make it readable. I haven’t looked at it yet, but my intent was to just see: is it a cluster of a certain number of homes in an area that is really noisy, or are they just spread out all over the city? Are they all complaining during the quiet time we’re supposed to have in the middle of the night, or is it scattered throughout the day? I guess I’m looking for a way to respond to these people.

DEMING: This isn’t set up for us to respond to on this one. Obviously, we talked about responding to the complaints we get directly, but this was just — like you said — you wanted to understand the patterns and times we were getting complaints. This was just for your knowledge base, understanding that information.

DELACY: I’ll take that on. Sorry that got so tangled up. I did not expect thousands and thousands of entries.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Okay. Item three. I’d like to start here. This is going to take the bulk of our time really. If you remember at the last meeting, we talked about what we learned at the Round Table of Roundtables on February 12th. We’ve talked about how much we have in common with the other tier one airports, which should not have been a surprise — it was just a surprise that they were out there, I guess.

Some of the other takeaways: we saw commonality of concerns, like pivoting from noise to health issues seemed to be a common theme with all of the roundtables that were there. Another common theme was the frustration with the FAA and the Part 150 studies and how we just can’t seem to budge them off that 65 DNL — study after study has shown that that’s really not an adequate measure of noise or the impact of noise.

The most surprising thing for me was finding out about the organizational structures of the other roundtables and how ours are quite a bit different. And then the role of the quiet skies programs in these other tier one airports is really quite a bit more extensive than our quiet skies program, which is kind of monitoring exceedances and trying to talk them out of late night flights. So, that’s where we were.

At the end, we talked to our city manager and said we would like to look into changes to the organization of StART. She asked us to go back and do a little bit more research. So, we had some time to do that.

What we found out — if you take a look at tier one airports, the FAA divides our airports up into tiers. We’re a tier one. I think we’re like number 14 in total passenger volume in the whole country, which was pretty good. Number 12 in international travel or something. Anyway, busy airport.

There are pretty significant differences in the role of the roundtables. Most of them kind of cluster in the middle with very similar concerns to ours, but some are quite different. If you take a look at Chicago O’Hare, their roundtable covers a much bigger area. There’s a lot of people, a lot of elected officials represented in their roundtable, and they have a fairly extensive quiet skies program. Still voluntary, but much more detailed than ours.

Most of them have a lot of participation by elected officials from the surrounding communities. Same issues: noise, air quality, traffic, negative economic impacts. And at the end of our meeting last time, we talked about how successful these organizations are. Some of them have had some successes.

A good example is Chicago O’Hare. They have a very extensive quiet skies program. They recently completely reconfigured their airport in the last decade, so they have the opportunity to change their landing and takeoff patterns. They’ve actually established a rotation — preferred runways they use in week one, then they rotate to preferred runways for week two. They have six runways and cross runways.

MEMBER: Yeah.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: So it seems like the successes are pretty correlated to the location and the layout of the airport. Even in airports that have just parallel runways like ours — LAX is like that — some of those airports have what I call, for lack of a better term, open ends. If you fly out of LAX in west flow, you fly out over the Pacific Ocean. Probably nobody out there complaining about noise.

MEMBER: Marine mammals.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Even in some of the other airports — if you take a look at the New York airports, LaGuardia and JFK, some of their runways just go out over that big bay. So there’s a lot of airports that don’t have all of the constraints. The problem we have here at Sea-Tac is it looks like we have all of the constraints. We have three parallel runways. There’s virtually no opportunity to adjust the approach and takeoff patterns. We’re completely surrounded by densely populated residential areas. We don’t have an open end. So it pretty seriously limits the mitigation that we can do here, at least in my opinion.

The other thing we found out — you can’t dig around on the internet too long asking about quiet skies programs without running into a lot of information about current aviation technology, much of it put up by manufacturers. This was mentioned at the Round Table of Roundtables too. There is technology out there that is going to be helpful in the future. We were talking about the newest generation of what they call geared turbofans, which are much more fuel efficient. But they’re only about a third of the way through the market — about a third of the airplanes out there have the newer engines, but the engines last such a long time that they think it’ll be 2035 before this generation of geared turbofans is fully online.

The downside for us is when we sit down and say, “Hey, what about air pollution and ultrafine particles?” they’re going to pull out, “Oh hey, we support sustainable aviation fuel.” Well, there’s a pretty long rollout on things like sustainable aviation fuel. Right now most jet engines can stand about a 1% blend. To get anywhere close to commercial amounts, like a 50% blend, you’re really waiting not for this generation of turbofans but the next generation. So you’re probably out in the 2040s.

What I picked up from looking at this: we can’t wait for technology. When we sit down and talk to people about what we need today, we need to have a pretty good idea of the timeline on these technologies, because people will say, “Well, we’re going to take care of that.” Realistically, in the Third Runway fight, when we started that, the 727s were still rocketing out of here and they’d rattle the windows. Now here we are 20 years later and the airplanes are quieter.

But two things. One, we need to know the timeline — so when somebody says “we’re going to take care of this,” you know when. And the other thing: if the aerospace people are saying they’re going to cut fuel consumption by 15% this generation and 15% the next generation, that’s fine. But if at the same time we increase the number of operations by 50%, we’re really back at the same total level of noise and the same total level of pollution.

I think that should be one of our findings — that we recognize technology is making improvements, but it isn’t going to happen in a timely fashion to be responsive to community needs today. We have to look for other forms of mitigation, such as compensation.

So anyway, after our last meeting, I looked into some of this stuff. I went back and met with Rebecca and Katherine. In the meantime, Jeff and Karen from Burien wanted to set up a meeting with us, and basically what we talked about was the information we got from the Round Table of Roundtables and our feeling that we have to make some basic changes to StART’s organization.

That is really what — if we’re going to proceed — there were a couple questions. We as the four community reps have been working on a document. Our goal is to get that ready, get everybody on board, hopefully get Tukwila and SeaTac on board, then get the city managers from the airport cities on board, and then take this whole recommendation to city councils. Then go back to StART and say, “For this to work for us, here’s what we need to see.”

But tonight what we really need to talk about is: if we’re going to do this, this was not in our original work plan. We have a council presentation scheduled for the end of May. Assuming our city manager agrees, we would get this presentation ready for council, and then either add that to our work plan or modify our work plan. Which is one of the things I wanted to talk about tonight — if we take a look at our work plan, is there something, one or two things, we might want to drop off if we’re going to focus on getting the changes we think we need at StART?

How could we as the airport advisory committee really affect much change? We’re an information group. We’ve done a pretty good job of assessing what’s out there. But it also seems the only practical avenue to take recommendations is through the roundtable. Two of us are reps there. You don’t need the whole group.

I think we should absolutely, when we consider our activities on this committee, see them as feeding our participation in the roundtable — which is where you’re facing the port and some of the decision makers. The problem we have now with the way the roundtable is structured is that it doesn’t have any clout. My phrase is: we’re sort of an amen chorus for them to flaunt and say, “Sure, we’re talking to the cities.” We’re checking a box. We’re not getting anything done.

I think we should see our committee as more of an appendage to the roundtable, almost like a working subcommittee that reflects Des Moines and focuses on Des Moines — because the roundtable is multi-community, obviously. The issue should be: what additional resources can the city provide to the airport committee, and what do we need to inform the recommendations that we push up to StART?

DELACY: When I talked to Jeff and brought him up to speed on our meetings, that was his concern too — if our primary goal is to essentially push for reorganization at StART to make it a more effective place to spend our time, do we know what the other cities think about this?

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: We think Burien is on board. And maybe SeaTac — I’ll check with them this week or next week and see where we are.

[41:54]

REAGIN: I have a picture in my head: when all of us go down and somebody stands up, we each want our two minutes — what a waste of time StART is. So at some point I said to everybody, I don’t quite want to get city managers involved yet. What I’m trying to do is get something among all the community reps. Then it’s time to get the committees involved, the city reps, and the city council. We’d like to come to agreement about what we’d like to see change — something at least half-baked, right?

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Yeah. Well, if you take a look at other roundtables out there, there’s a lot of representation from elected officials. We think at a minimum we should have the county council members from districts five, seven, and eight — that’s the airport communities — represented at StART.

Even though I myself have in the past said I didn’t think it was worthwhile going to Olympia, or that the federal government was a waste of time — after talking to some of the folks at other roundtables around the country, their advice is: no, you have to really stay focused at the state level. So it would be having representatives from our legislative delegation on StART.

That’s because at the federal level — and they had a pretty good article I sent out to all you guys, I think Rebecca, that was presented at the symposium —

DEMING: Which one? I’m sorry.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Oh, the beach article — there wasn’t an article presented, but it does go through some of the same points. Maybe it was just passed on from NICAR. Anyway, dealing with the FAA and their total authority in all things airports — the only way that’s going to change, the only way you’re going to make any headway with 65 DNL or anything else we want to try to change, it’s going to have to take place at the federal level. If you take a look at some of the other airport roundtables, they have representatives from their congressional delegation there also.

Why that’s important: let’s get back to the compensation issue, which is money that’s going to come from the legislature and from Washington. We’re not going to get anything directly from the FAA, but we have to raise the concerns through these other avenues — that we’re a disproportionately affected community, and no, we’re not going to try to change the flight patterns. There’s no mitigation that can effectively be done functionally through airport operations as they’re now set up. That’s a given.

Therefore, we have to really focus our energies on what kind of compensation will make the community whole. I believe that out of the Third Runway, a lot of the schools got rebuilt and were soundproofed. Where did that all come from? Well, that came out of Third Runway. And that wasn’t FAA money, but it was recognized that the port is a regional asset and it makes a lot of money for a lot of areas that benefit from it. But we’re the communities that have to pay with the noise and possibly the health issues. And we won’t even get to the health issues because those are going to be years down the road.

So let’s start looking at — the city has budget deficits. There are services the city has difficulty delivering which would normally come from property taxes and things that we don’t have. One of the problems with having somewhat depressed property values is that it directly affects community coffers. I think we might want to start thinking about ways communities received compensation when you couldn’t fix the other problems — to mitigate an acknowledged problem.

I think we all agree, at least the four of us, that these are going to be really difficult discussions, and we don’t have anybody at the table at StART with clout. Well, let’s say somebody that actually needs our vote.

DELACY: Yeah. Look at the way it’s set up. You’ve got port people who run the meetings, then you have citizen representatives and maybe a city manager, but they’re employees — they don’t have that elected clout. If there was actually a port commissioner involved, or even better a state rep — who’s the boss of the port? It’s the state legislature, because we can’t count on the port commission.

REAGIN: No. Their job is basically on the port’s side, and if we’re thinking that somehow out of their beneficence they’re going to pat us on the head and say don’t worry about it — yeah, that’s right.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: I think realistically, without disparaging anybody — if you look at it, just do the math. None of them need any votes out of the airport cities either to get elected or stay elected. Being countywide seats, they do not need our votes. So we need people at the table that actually need our vote — county council members, state representatives, state senators, people that actually care about our votes. Right now, we just don’t have that on StART.

They’ll say nice things to us and they’ll roll out some very glossy, detailed presentations on all the things they’re doing for the environment — and they’re doing those things — but it doesn’t really impact or address our problems, the livability issues that are here.

So this is what we would like to take to Katherine once we get this pulled together, and then we’d like to get it to a council presentation at the end of May.

DEMING: So right now it was scheduled for the beginning of May. So I’m assuming you want to try and move it to the June study session.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: I thought it was end of May, but I don’t know how fast — yeah, why don’t we do that?

DEMING: Okay. So we’ll put it tentatively for June.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Yeah, I think that’d be fine. That would give Burien a chance — we’ll do a fourth study session and see where we’re at at the next meeting. If we’re ready, great. If not, we’ll push it again.

DELACY: Two weeks. We’re not going to get where we want to be.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: That’s why I said I would check at this meeting if we were going to be ready. Can you help with that, Jeff? Because the final thing we need to do — and we might need Jeff’s input — is to look at our current work plan and see how we want to modify that. If the council says, “Okay, we agree with you guys, focus on this issue” — is there something we want to drop off our work plan to make room for this?

DEMING: You were going to redistribute the work plan at Katherine’s request.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: It’s in the — oh, okay. So that’s part of the next item. We’ve got one more discussion. The last item is to discuss that. So we can take a look at these right now one at a time.

We have “support city response and/or comments to the SAMP draft EIS” — and we’ve done that.

DEMING: I tried to abbreviate it. Part of what I was originally trying to do was what you guys requested at the last meeting, which was listing them on each agenda to talk about each item. If there’s a different way you want it listed, let me know, and when you guys update it, I’ll include the updated version too.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: “Support the city as needed in public education efforts.” Is that something that we still see as something we can do?

DEMING: Our hope is when the SAMP is getting ready to come out — like last time, we had a public meeting — we’re hoping there’ll be a role for you guys to help get the word out and maybe even assist.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: To me, that’s kind of window dressing — no offense — compared to what we really have to do.

DEMING: Research mitigation measures, make additional mitigation recommendations — absolutely. I think we can keep it in the work plan as something ongoing that the committee would work on as we get more exposure to these issues. It’s going to take time to figure out who’s doing what, and we’ll get some of this from the roundtable and there might be some other ideas.

The other kind of missing piece of this — the Part 150 allowance — tomorrow’s the first meeting of the planning commission. That’ll give the planning commission an opportunity. We’ll be updating codes and there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to look at to potentially identify areas where funds could be allocated to mitigate physical limitations — the equivalent of a traffic mitigation. You’re not going to stop the heavy traffic, but what can you do to mitigate? Like with stormwater — you’re not going to stop the downpour, but you create detention areas for water and things like that.

REAGIN: I think because the impression I get as I read through all the port stuff is they want to say, “Hey look, here’s what’s going to happen, this is going to make it so much better in the future.” What are the things that we as a group can concentrate on that will make a difference right now?

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Yeah. I think that’s what we need when we look through our work plan.

DELACY: Well, one of the first things that comes to mind — and really Joe has championed this, which we haven’t thought about — we’ve all been focused on the noise — is the traffic.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: I think traffic is absolutely one of the things we need to focus on because, from what I’m reading, they’re only looking at traffic at the airport. They’re not looking at the traffic in the communities around it.

For example — it’s my understanding the city owns some of the bridges, like on 14th and 16th or something, the twin bridges. The city owns those bridges, and those bridges are going to be absolutely impacted with traffic. So what if we say, “Those bridges need upgrading and we can attribute that upgrading directly to the expansion of flights” — therefore that would be an easier thing probably to find money for than other kinds of mitigation such as relocation.

The last thing on our list was a community survey. I know Jeff liked the idea of a community survey. I think the feedback we got from administration was that there are a couple of surveys out there this year and we didn’t want to step on those.

Is that something we want to keep on our list, or is that something we might want to —

DELACY: I think periodic resurveying is a good idea. We have to look long term. This is not going to be resolved this year at all. But there should be — it should almost be a budget thing where, two years from now when flights have increased and the SAMP’s been approved and the traffic has increased — how’s that going? That may become more of an irritant than the noise of the airplanes.

REAGIN: What is the city surveying?

DEMING: Most of the surveys — like we had the strategic plan survey, that was a big one. It just depends on what’s going on at the specific time. I don’t know if there’s anything out there right this moment, but when we started, the big push was the strategic plan.

REAGIN: Is there any way to incorporate some questions about the airport in any of those surveys?

DEMING: I think we could look at that, depending on when the next citywide survey is. But we would need to discuss what kind of questions you want and where it makes sense to put them.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: For example, Katherine was very good about explaining the distinction between a strategic plan and a land use plan. A strategic plan is a lot of stuff. Land use is pretty much about zoning and land use. And one of the things that has to happen to create a platform to plan is inventories.

Rebecca, you know the process — you survey, you do some stuff, you go back and keep rechecking. I think in that context, the airport activity would be absolutely appropriate to survey and get a benchmark, maybe this year.

DELACY: Just as far as what you see — and again, focus perhaps on the noise and the traffic.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: I think it’s important to get a baseline, right?

DELACY: Yeah. Before we do anything else. But that should be done regularly because that will be feedback. Down the road when we’ve maybe got responses — people will run on “we’re going to improve it” — and there ought to be a benchmark. How’s that going? How’s that happening? And in terms of the budgeting that goes to capital improvements — it’s long term. Look at 509, how long that’s been going on.

DEMING: Can definitely stay on the agenda. Set aside some time to discuss what you guys want those questions to be — it’ll be your work plan to come up with those survey questions.

DELACY: The other thing that Barton brought up I think is really important, thinking about the future: the reorganization of StART — there will be a time when we’re through, we’re past this. That’s what happened with the Third Runway. There was some kind of a broad settlement, everybody said okay, and all of the organizations that opposed it went away or were part of that discussion. To my knowledge, they all just basically went away and there was no ongoing discussion about how everything rolled out.

Maybe we didn’t need it, but I’m thinking that if we’re going to go from 54 million passengers a year to 70 million passengers a year, even a decade from now, we’d better have an organization in place that can talk about the ongoing impacts.

REAGIN: And arguably technology might come up with things 10 years from now. Maybe there’ll be electric planes and then they’ll have their own externalities. But we all know whatever technology improvements on planes, we’re looking 20, 30 years.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: That’s right. Because they’re not going to dock all the planes. They have 50-year lives.

The other constraint we have — if you take a look at some of the other tier one airports around the country, and this came up at the last meeting with the COG presentation: what about the unmet demand and where does it go? Other airports — LAX, I think there’s three satellite airports; San Francisco has a couple of satellite airports.

But our problem here is that there’s really only one realistic airport that could ever come online quickly to absorb unmet demand, and that’s going to be a fight of its own up in Everett.

DELACY: Yeah.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: To expect that’s going to come on in time to take some of the demand off of Sea-Tac is wishful thinking. So we’re going to need an organization that looks out for us, that’s accountable to us, that needs our votes — because this isn’t going to be the end of it. Once we hit some of those numbers, once we get to 60 million —

DELACY: Well, we still have ongoing population growth. The Pacific Northwest has continued to grow. And those communities that are going to be most affected by all these externalities are the least affluent — the immigrant communities. Identifying and focusing on that may help with funding, because often there is money if you identify it that way.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: I think in some ways it’s to the port district’s benefit to expand the organization and get these voices at the table. We haven’t even touched on — I think we touched on this at our meeting — what’s going to happen if you take a look at Vashon. This is happening all over the country with NextGen navigation. You concentrate all that traffic into a narrow band, and now what we’ve got out of Vashon is a lawsuit because all these people — traffic that was scattered out over a five-mile-wide downwind is now in a very narrow pattern.

The same thing will eventually happen on the east hill. You take a look at the daily comings and goings of the airplanes over there — they’re scattered out from one end clear out to Covington. Once they install all the NextGen equipment, that’s all going to get put down into one narrow little pathway. And you’re going to get the same reaction from those people that you’re getting from Vashon.

REAGIN: I don’t see how Vashon has a problem compared to living right in the Third Runway.

[41:50]

DEMING: Back to the work plan amendment discussion. What I’m hearing is: because a lot of this work plan is specifically related to the SAMP — which will really end up being condensed into a couple months, and then it’s out of our hands until they respond and there’s a final EIS released — I’m hearing you want to bring back additional discussion or a proposal to amend the work plan to add the StART work we’ve discussed.

Is there something else? The survey — once you do the questions, you’re kind of done, and it’s something you review when the data comes out. But is that going to be your primary thing for this year: the StART reorganization, and then SAMP when it’s that time, and then think about if there’s something else to do next year?

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Yeah. I think that’s how we should present it. Just say, “Hey, this is the immediate thing. We’re not going to get anywhere with this organization.”

DEMING: That’s correct. And we understand you’ve got a timeline with SAMP. We need to be responsive to that.

REAGIN: We need to start the reorg.

DEMING: No, I’m more trying to think of what you guys are going to be doing so that I can help write the work plan.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Right. And I think Joe’s speaking to a longer term. This was kind of a one-year ad hoc.

DEMING: Yeah. The work plan is a one-year document. So we’re talking about amending your 2026 work plan, and then you could start drafting what your 2027 work plan would be.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: I think just looking at what we’re saying we’re going to concentrate on — StART, survey, traffic, noise — I don’t really think we need to adjust the work plan that much because that’s really touching everything in the work plan. We may want to say something specific about StART that we don’t have in there right now. But most of it is covered.

REAGIN: I had this discussion with Jeff yesterday, and maybe you and I have touched on this too — I was interested in traffic and then I got Appendix L. I became a whole lot less interested in traffic.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Yeah. Well, it’s the way it’s presented.

REAGIN: Okay. So, as just lay people on a volunteer committee, how useful is our input on traffic?

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: It’s identifying it. Because I see traffic and the highways and the bridges as receptors for possible mitigation funding. They’re going to be impacted. I don’t think you have to go to a lot of depth. You’ve done the high level. You can’t do traffic studies on access into the airport. But we all drive there, and what is going to happen when you quadruple — with traffic, at best you spread it out. Now we allow two hours to get to the airport; it’s going to mean we allow three hours. Then what does that do to the traffic? Some areas are maybe built to absorb it. Maybe 509 will take some of the pressure off, maybe not when it’s done.

We’ve certainly got infrastructure needs within the city which are already critical and they’re not going to get any better because of this. When it comes to traffic, going through Appendix L, we need to know where they think the pinch points are going to be.

Because what’s going to happen — the city is going to get the complaints about traffic, and there’s going to be people who won’t connect that to the airport. They’re just going to say, “The city’s doing a bad job with traffic.”

REAGIN: But it’s being driven by extra capacity at the airport.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Exactly. So I think we need to be knowledgeable about the traffic. That hooks in with the community feedback, the community survey. If part of that is to pay for a survey to show that, then we simply say, look, we’re not traffic engineers — hell no. We just see this feedback from the public about traffic. We know from the stuff the port gave us that this extra traffic is being driven by the airport. What are you going to do for us? How are you going to help us pay for the streets?

REAGIN: But the point I’m trying to make is: I read through Appendix L and I have some questions. I said, “Hey, who should I talk to about this?” So I go into Tommy’s office and say, “Hey, what about the signals at the flag, the triangle up there? And the port says they’re going to do this and that.” And he says, “Yeah, I’ve already studied it.” So, am I wasting his time?

DEMING: Well, no, because we’re a conduit to translate. I’ll talk again — under the rules, I can’t authorize time — but I will talk to Katherine, see if we can have maybe Tommy come and explain what his analysis of Appendix L is and help discuss it with you.

REAGIN: Is there somebody on staff that’s already looking at this?

DEMING: Yes, we looked at it under NEPA. We also are looking at hiring consultants under our three-city ILA to look at the SEPA one, because we don’t even know if they’re going to use the exact same one or if there’s going to be a new traffic study.

REAGIN: So instead of us reading through Appendix L, maybe our role is Tommy comes to us and says, “Hey, at the next StART meeting, I want you to bring this up.”

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Very good. We’re a conduit. Is that more of our role?

DEMING: Yes. But I don’t know that Appendix L to a NEPA would be something you bring up at StART.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Oh, I would. Because that’s specific to the environmental impacts of a specific project that’s already in a process.

DEMING: Well, the roundtable is intended to be a lot broader than that. And that’s kind of the point.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Well, see, that’s our problem — they come in and do a fairly glossy PowerPoint presentation and it looks nice and they all sound like they’re talking to us, but we never get to the level of detail about the queueing area at the flag plaza. We’re never going to talk about that unless I say, “Hey, your Appendix L shows three intersections in Des Moines that are going to be impacted, and your solution for this is you’re going to adjust the signal lengths. And what I see when I try to come downtown — I see traffic backed up to 208. Come on, folks. Is this reality?”

But do I need to dig that information out for myself? Or if Tommy’s already got it and he says, “Hey, look at this, this doesn’t make sense to us — take it to StART.” I’d be more than happy to do that as long as I understand halfway what I’m talking about. But I don’t need to totally understand it.

We need to be conversant, if not expert. We need to say, “Hey, we’re concerned about this, and you apparently aren’t.”

REAGIN: Or “explain to us how that is going to work.”

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Yeah. Explain to me exactly how I’m going to get downtown from my house. Why shouldn’t I be concerned? So you see, Rebecca, what I’m trying to do is figure out what’s our best use of not only our time, but staff time also.

DEMING: We are not afraid to speak up.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Well, it keeps us awake in afternoon meetings. Otherwise we’d be dozing off looking at our phones. Any further discussion? Anything more you need from us?

DEMING: No. The only other thing — we kind of skipped over item four, but we are expecting the SAMP draft EIS likely to come out in May or June. We are still supposed to get a 30-day notice ahead of time, which we haven’t gotten yet. So it’s either going to be the very end of May or June.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: When that comes out — to Joe’s point, if it’s a 300-page report, which it probably will be — wouldn’t it be a good idea, is there somebody who’s kind of an expert — we’ve got those people on board, right?

DEMING: Yeah, that’s what we’re working on, the contracts among the three-city ILA.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: So somebody will assist with expertise. It was kind of fun — Jeff sent the Vashon Island lawsuit to us, and I just inadvertently opened it up and all of a sudden I get ChatGPT or something. It just summarizes the whole thing for me. It was great — 11-page lawsuit and it just says, “Here are the things you need to know.” So I went, wow, that was cool. So maybe we can do that with the SAMP report. And Appendix L.

Well, anyway, my concern is that we — we’re not sure what the comment period’s going to be. We don’t know if it’s going to be 30, which is the minimum. Could be 45. Usually they grant us at least the extra 15 days. So, we expect it to be a minimum of 45-day comment period, but we’re hoping for 60 if not more.

REAGIN: Would it be at all appropriate — we sort of talked about this at prior meetings — for the airport committee to have a forum and maybe have some other experts here, and we would just sort of be under our auspices and people could come in and ask questions or volunteer comment?

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: I think that’s what we need to press StART for. Like we talked about technology — they do have public meetings the port puts on.

DEMING: Yeah. But we will also usually have our own. People don’t trust the port. But it won’t be for us to necessarily receive public comment. It’ll be helping people understand how to make public comment, because we’re not the holder.

We want to make sure if someone comes and wants to make a comment, they’re not just making the comment to us — they’re also making the comment on the document to the port. And so we want to make sure that people understand that. That’s what our public meeting generally — what we did on the NEPA — was about. Here’s what you should write, how you should comment, where you can comment.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: And there’s a role for us because we can draft these kind of — comments don’t generally get you anywhere — but we want to send them in. We’re citizens. You can find the sample letter we put up through the NEPA document on our website still.

As we work through this, I just want to make sure we make the best use of everybody’s time and that there’s a message that needs to get to StART. Hopefully we’re here, that’s our role — we can deliver that.

DEMING: And again, that was council direction on the NEPA. We haven’t really had that discussion about whether it’s going to happen for SEPA.

REAGIN: Just imagined we would. Rebecca, another question — what about the lawsuits ongoing? I’d be kind of curious where they are, what they are. Not that we have any direct — the city has hired counsel.

DEMING: Is it the FAA or the port? And is it SEPA or NEPA?

REAGIN: NEPA, because NEPA is what’s been put out.

DEMING: Administrative review. We filed for administrative review. That’s to the FAA because they were the responsible party on NEPA. The port, in my understanding, will be the responsible party for SEPA. They’re their own SEPA official — correct — like we are. But the FAA is the NEPA official.

REAGIN: So you file an administrative appeal and it comes back and they say, “Hey, sorry guys, nothing here.” Is the next step the lawsuit?

DEMING: I can find out what update I can give for the next meeting. I can find out how much detail is available because it came up.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Just so we know what we don’t know.

DEMING: Yeah. And there’s a lot of attorney-client privilege in this.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Yeah. We don’t know. That’s why I want to make sure we’re not accidentally disclosing something. But we also have to be able to say, “You’re charging off in the wrong direction, folks.” We don’t want to be a hindrance to what’s going on.

DEMING: A rogue committee.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Okay. Anything else for anybody? I’ll see if I can catch up with Jeff. I haven’t heard from Todd lately, but I can catch up with him. And you’re all up to date.

Yeah, we’ve got another meeting soon and we’ll keep pushing on this document. As soon as we get it ready, we’ll daylight that.

DELACY: And I’ll go through the feedback spreadsheet and see if I can make something of it. It looks like they’re by year. So, if you’re only concerned about the last two years, you just look at the two Excel documents and then leave the rest for future discussion. I just pulled it up and looked — it had like 10 Excel documents. It looks like the first is through March 9th when I made the request of this year, and then there’s one for last year. It’s basically per year for what they’ve provided.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Okay. I’ll jump in there and make some bullet points for everybody about what I see. I’d like to talk to those people.

DEMING: Based on direction, I don’t think we asked for phone numbers even if they were provided. We just asked for the address, because we wanted to know location. So I don’t know that we asked for any contact information really.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: No, not really. And that’s really not what I need. I think what we need is location — to see if there’s a cluster — and time, to see if they’re getting woken up by that 3:30 flight out of here every morning, just like I do.

DELACY: But I wake up when the cat jumps up on the bed.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: That’s when it’s dark. When I’m hearing overflights, I’m going, “Well, it’s at least five — it’s morning.” Don’t get too comfortable.

Okay. All right. Great. Motion to adjourn.

MEMBER: Motion to adjourn.

CHAIR DUSENBERRY: Thank you. Thanks, folks. We powered through this stuff and we have some direction and we will continue.

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