Runway project to get more scrutiny – updated forecasts show sea-tac might be busier than initially predicted
The Port of Seattle will conduct a rare supplemental environmental assessment of its third runway project at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The investigation, expected to last about a month, comes in the wake of updated Federal Aviation Administration forecasts that indicate flight operations – takeoffs and landings – at the field may rise far higher and faster than initially predicted.
Airport officials said the new forecasts indicate the third runway may need to be built sooner.
But opponents say unpublished FAA estimates that flight operations could top 650,000 a year by 2010 – the FAA’s current official forecast is just under 500,000 – mean that the port should reassess whether an entire new airport should be built instead.
And they question whether the port manipulated release of the new numbers.
The airport recorded 386,000 takeoffs and landings in 1995 and expects a final count for 1996 to top 400,000 said Michael Feldman, manager of the airport’s third runway project.
The port’s own projections of traffic in 2010 are 405,000 to near 500,000. The new FAA estimates are more than 30 percent higher than the top end of that range.
“All that these numbers suggest is that we get on with the project as soon as possible,” Feldman said.
Actual construction of the third runway could be years off. The project is the subject of two lawsuits by runway opponents.
“It’s clear the traffic numbers on which they relied for their decision were wrong,” said Peter Kirsch, the Washington, D.C.-based lawyer for the Aircraft Communities Coalition, a group of neighboring towns that make up the project’s chief opponents.
Kirsch said that in his years representing both pro and con clients in airport cases, he’s never seen a supplemental environmental impact statement issued.
“The reason this is so significant,” he said, “is that all the regional debate and all the regional decision-making was based on erroneous numbers.”
Kirsch and other sources also questioned whether the port delayed revealing the operations forecasts to avoid creating a major political fight last July.
That’s when the Puget Sound Regional Council decided to sidestep the findings of an expert panel, which ruled that airport officials hadn’t done all they could to mitigate noise from Sea-Tac’s second runway.
Would knowledge of the increased operations numbers have changed the regional council’s vote?
“That’s pure speculation,” said Pierce County Executive Doug Sutherland, who is president of the regional council.
“It may have, but I’m really not sure.”
Kirsch agreed.
“The broad issue had been decided,” he said. “The only question was terms and conditions.
“The port certainly didn’t want the debate reopened.”
Here’s the timetable of important dates leading up to the port and FAA decision to conduct the supplemental impact study:
* The port issued its final environmental impact statement in early February 1996.
* The regional council’s executive board voted to take steps to circumvent its expert panel in late April.
* Port officials became aware of the revised FAA numbers in June or July, Feldman said Thursday in an interview.
*The regional council’s general assembly ratified its executive board on July 11.
*A table listing the new FAA forecasts in Port of Seattle documents is dated July 17.
Feldman insisted there was no attempt to keep anyone from learning the numbers.
“The first anybody knew of them was on the Internet,” he said, adding that the forecast was drafted in the FAA’s Washington, D.C., offices, not at regional FAA headquarters in Auburn.
The new forecasts made the need for a supplemental environmental impact statement obvious, said local FAA spokesman Mitch Barker.
“We need to take a look at the impacts based on the new figures,” he said.
Plans to conduct the supplemental study were not widely announced to the public, however.
The only mentions were in a Federal Register notice late last month and in a legal notice published Wednesday in newspapers in Burien and Des Moines.
“We’ve talked about it for quite some time,” said Anita Risdon, Sea-Tac spokeswoman. “I don’t know that we didn’t announce it.”
In fact, a three-page internal port memo titled “Public Affairs Strategy: Change in Forecasting Numbers,” written by Risdon in late August, suggests the agency take a “reactive public affairs approach, responding to a reporter’s questions when asked …”
The sequence of events has left a bitter feeling with third runway opponents, who will be in King County Superior Court Jan. 24 to argue for summary judgment in their suit against the regional council’s noise review process.
Kirsch said the port had played “fast and loose” with details of its analysis of the need for a third runway.
“If the impact is bigger, than maybe the region needed to focus on another airport,” Kirsch said. “If it were smaller, certainly it was a (port) rush to judgment.”
The FAA’s new projections “certainly weren’t generally discussed, and I don’t believe they were generally known,” he said. “Because they’re so pivotal, they should have been publicly discussed.”
Feldman said that’s the point of the supplemental impact study. The public will have time to comment; a public hearing is expected.
“We may find the issue of what the forecasts say (to be) academic because we’ve been saying we’re growing faster than the forecasts for two or three years, and we’ve got to get on with the project,” he said by telephone from a Hood Canal resort where key port players in the airport project were attending a retreat.
“We certainly haven’t based all our facilities plans on the forecasts.”
But Des Moines City Manager Bob Olander said the incident spotlights the port’s attitude throughout much of the seven years-plus that a third runway has been planned and debated.
“I don’t think they’re necessarily duplicitous,” he said. “I do think they’re unnecessarily arrogant.”