By Fred Felleman and Hamdi Mohamed
Special to The Seattle Times
The Seattle Tacoma International Airport is the nation’s fastest-growing airport of its size with over 400,000 flights carrying 50.8 million passengers in 2023. As a result, it continues to undergo extensive renovations that create jobs to build and operate the new facilities.
Less obvious to travelers, but still of concern to us, is when you take off or land at SEA, there are tens of thousands of people who live near the flight path. Housing is cheaper and incomes are lower than the median of King County, but residents in near-airport communities also are more directly exposed to the noise from airport operations. As elected officials, we are committed to addressing the needs of both residents and travelers.
To mitigate some of these effects, the FAA and the Port of Seattle have spent over $300 million on the installation of nearly 9,500 sound insulation “port packages” in homes, schools, apartments and places of worship over the last 40 years. These packages, which can involve the replacement of windows, doors, insulation and HVAC systems, can exceed $100,000 per home.
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While work on sound insulation for homes in airport communities is not new to the Port, the repair of past installations is. Since the FAA does not have a program that provides matching funds for repairs or replacements, in February the Port Commission passed an order dedicating $6.5 million to a Repair and Replacement Pilot Program for eligible homes. Last session, the state Legislature, in partnership with the Port, passed Senate Bill 5955, which created a $1 million fund to begin the repair of homes with failing windows and insulation. Congress appropriated an additional $3 million toward the effort.
It is important to distinguish this effort to repair previously installed packages from the current FAA evaluation of the Port’s Sustainable Airport Master Plan, which is open for public comment. (Submit your comments at st.news/port.) In response to the Port’s request, the FAA extended the comment deadline to Dec. 13 to provide additional time for review of the considerable document. Any mitigation measures identified would be completely independent of this undertaking if approved.
Before beginning repair work, the Port embarked upon an assessment to accurately estimate how widespread the problem of underperforming packages is across different window brands, installers and age of installation.
Following consultation with government partners, constituents and community organizations, the Port sent a questionnaire to a representative sample of 3,200 homes within the geographic boundary the FAA currently deems eligible for funding new packages. The results from the 1,070 respondents will be released by the beginning of next year.
The Port is applying its equity index to this entire process, focusing first on communities nearest to the airport. Based on the results of this pilot project and future funding, homes that are now outside the current FAA noise boundary may also be repaired.
If, after inspections, the problem is found to be widespread, we will seek additional funding from the state and Congress as well as FAA authority to share the cost and responsibility of the program. In the meantime, the Port in coordination with the state is committed to using our existing pilot project funding to repair as many homes as we can. The approach will also be informed by efforts in San Francisco, the only other airport in the country we know of that is conducting similar work.
We are committed to finding comprehensive, long-term solutions to ensure that previous systems installed to minimize noise exposure to near-port communities perform as designed. We’re also committed to ensuring the voices of those South King County community members are heard throughout this process.