Article Summary:
— SEATAC
In the control tower, they are pulsing green numbers crawling across radar screens.
To Lloyd Docter in Brown’s Point, Craig Lorch on Beacon Hill, Minnie Brasher in Burien and thousands of their neighbors, they’re roar after thundering roar in the night.
As the rumbling stream of jets taking off and landing from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has swelled into a mighty river in recent years, so too has swelled the chorus of complaints from those living below the flight paths.
Since the late 1980s, groups in communities near the airport have tried time and again to plunge a stake through the heart of a seemingly unkillable proposal to build a third runway at Sea-Tac for the ever-increasing air traffic.
Now the airport’s neighbors are being joined by angry homeowners from Tacoma to Snohomish County.
Led by members of local community councils, by an “enraged housewife,” a retired boatbuilder and a former Seattle City Council member, groups opposing any Sea-Tac expansion and frustrated by current airport noise are trying to organize into a single supergroup to grapple with the Port of Seattle, which runs the airport, and the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates air traffic.
The coalition doesn’t have a name yet.
But its mission is clear, says Jeanette Williams, for 20 years a member of the Seattle City Council, and one of the principal organizers.
It will fight any attempts to put in a third runway, and it will try to make the port more responsive to the community, Williams said.
“We’re putting the final touches on it now,” says Dave Smith, another of the main organizers.
Smith, a retired boatbuilder who lives in Burien, is president of one of the first and largest airport noise groups, CASE, Citizen’s Alternatives to Sea-Tac Expansion.
CASE is based in the South King County neighborhoods that surround the airport. For years, Smith says, people from other parts of Puget Sound often had little sympathy with airport noise complaints.
“A lot of people said, `If you don’t like it, why don’t you move?’ ” agreed Minnie Brasher, another organizer from Burien.
Then, two years ago, the Federal Aviation Administration decided to relieve crowded skies by redirecting more than a hundred flights a day into new approach patterns, in a move dubbed the four-post plan (because of the four navigational fixes used to guide aircraft landing or leaving).
Suddenly, jets were rumbling over Brown’s Point in Tacoma, over Issaquah, over northeast Seattle and Beacon Hill, new parts of Federal Way and Burien.
“We were told we wouldn’t be affected. The day that four-post plan went into effect the airplanes started coming over,” recalls Carla Janes, a self-described “enraged housewife” who lives on the east side of Burien.
“We complained to the FAA and they told us to use the (airport noise) hotline. We called the hotline for a year” to no avail, she said.
“This may seem a strange way to put it,” said Smith, “but the four-post plan was the best thing to happen” to groups organizing against airport noise.
“Suddenly all these people on Mercer Island, on the North End, in Tacoma were saying, `Hey, we can’t stand this.’ They found out they had a problem and these groups started to come alive,” said Smith.
The Seattle Community Council Federation, co-chaired by Williams, filed suit last year in federal court challenging the four-post plan, saying the FAA should have reviewed the plan’s environmental impact before adopting it. Both sides are awaiting a ruling from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, groups that organized because of the four-post plan are banding together on the issue of a third Sea-Tac Airport runway.
The airport logged about 213,000 takeoffs and landings in 1980. By last year, that number was up to 355,000, and is expected to top 400,000 by 1996, when maximum capacity is reached.
The port, in conjunction with the Puget Sound Council of Governments (PSCOG), has been sponsoring a committee that’s been conducting a two-year study of how best to deal with the growing demand for air service. Options range from replacing Sea-Tac to supplementing it with a secondary airport far to the north or south. A possible third runway is also an option.
Airport Director Andrea Riniker repeatedly has said a third runway is only one possibility, and that there will be lots of studies and opportunities for public input before any decision is made.
She could be talking to a wall.
“They’ll tell you they’re thinking of lots of options, but they’re really looking at the third runway,” says Smith. His view is echoed by most airport noise activists, many of whom readily admit they are deeply suspicious of anything port officials say.
“The credibility of the port is at issue,” said Williams.
Williams criticized the port and PSCOG’s air-traffic options committee as loaded with transportation professionals, “with one or two token people from the community.”
Port Commissioner Paige Miller said elected officials make up more than one-third of the 36-member committee. And they were picked by the PSCOG, not the port. Each body appointed roughly half the committee members.
People have a right to be concerned and ask questions, but “the committee is not a creature of the Port of Seattle,” she said.
Still, said Williams, “the public feels they can’t believe what the port’s telling them, it just comes up time and again.”
No one may be more familiar with the port’s credibility problem than the airport’s community-relations manager, Rosie Courtney.
“I hear that constantly,” she says. “I don’t deny that in the past the port helped create these bad feelings. In the past the port was not open to public involvement and input, they just moved forward and made decisions.”
“But that’s changed tremendously,” since 1988, when Riniker became airport director, Courtney said. The former city manager of Bellevue, and later the director of the state Department of Ecology, Riniker has worked with port commissioners to let the public know what is happening and encourage public input, Courtney said.
As long as the number of jets rumbling through the skies keeps growing, however, the port may face continuing ire.
According to Earl Monday, manager of the airport’s noise-remediation program, the most recent study, in 1988, estimated 70,000 people lived where the average noise from aircraft was enough to disrupt sleep or conversation, and loud enough for the FAA to fund noise remediation, such as home insulation.
A new study based on 1990 census figures and current flight patterns should be completed this fall, he said.
Of the 10,000 homes identified as eligible for insulation, only 418 had been insulated as of last month, Monday said. At current funding levels, another 30 homes a month are being completed, he said. The work can vary from simply installing double windows, thicker doors and storm doors, to revamping a home’s insulation, putting in cellulose wall and ceiling insulation, and even putting in new walls.
Even in areas far outside the insulation zone, noise complaints are common. More than 1,200 complaints were called in to the airport’s noise hotline last month, said Wayne Bryant, a noise-abatement officer for the port. That’s down from more than 2,100 calls in July, 1990, but Bryant didn’t claim dissatisfaction has dropped.
“There’s not much difference in the noise level,” he said. “Some people may just have gotten to the point of feeling frustrated and giving up.”
Today, coalition organizers are meeting to plan their common strategy in dealing with airport noise and expansion issues. The meeting is not open to the general public, Smith said.
Potentially, the coalition will represent 25 Seattle-area community councils, and groups from Mercer Island, Burien, Federal Way, Tacoma, Tukwila, Des Moines, Normandy Park, Bellevue, Vashon and northeast Seattle.
“We all recognize Seattle has to have an airport,” said Smith. “And we can live with a fair amount of noise. We’ll help come up with alternatives (to a third runway).”
Smith said he and others can’t live with the increase of tens of thousands of additional flights if Sea-Tac expands.
“That,” he said, “would be insufferable.”