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[Meeting Moderator/Rebecca Deming]:
Hello everyone. I want to let everyone know that we are recording this and we have the media here. Once this is recorded it is going to go on our website so that it can be watched. I know the room logistics is a little weird – for those people online you can’t see me. The podium is in the back of the room which is where the video will show up, so I am speaking from the front of the room at the moment, but when we get to questions at the end we’ll probably go to the back of the room so that it can be seen on the video for those who are online.
I just want to thank everyone for coming today. I’m Rebecca Deming, I’m the new community development director. I want to recognize and thank those council members who are here today – Deputy Mayor Steinitz, please stand and wave. Thank you Council Member Achziger, Council Member Mahoney, Council Member Harris. Did I miss anyone that I missed walking in? No? Okay perfect.
As background, this meeting is on the sustainable airport master plan (SAMP) and the associated comment period for the environmental assessment or EA as we’ll refer to it throughout the meeting. This is the latest in the work done by the city and its consultants that started back around 2018 when the port and the FAA produced the scoping information. The city and the neighboring cities of CC, Normandy Park and Burien signed an agreement to work together to coordinate its response to the SAMP and the environmental documents. This process is ongoing.
The city submitted comments to the scoping back in 2018 for those that didn’t know that, and then the pandemic occurred and this whole process slowed down, which is why we’re finally here today in 2024. The port and FAA, which is kind of one and the same in this process, released this EA and we’re currently in that comment period which ends next Friday.
I’m going to turn this presentation over to the city’s consultants. The port and FAA have nothing to do with this meeting – these are the city consultants, which is Vianair and their representative Jason Schwarz and Jim Allerdice. I’ll go ahead and turn it over.
[Jim Allarderdice]:
Hi everybody, my name is Jim Allardice. With me tonight is Jason Schwarz and Emily Tranter, all part of the consultant team. I am the chief of consulting operations for Vire. My background is primarily air traffic control, so whenever if and when we get to some of the flight procedure stuff, I’ll be stepping in on that. But until that time you’re in Jason’s good hands. His background is airports and community engagement. He’s done community engagement for numerous projects and he’s also done environmental reviews for a number of cities and counties. I’ll let Emily introduce herself – she also works on community engagement and government coordination side.
[Emily Tranter]:
Hello everybody. Emily Traner here. I’m based out in Washington DC. My firm Primacy Strategy Group focuses on community engagement and advocacy around aviation noise impacts. I’m also the executive director of NOISE, which is the community airport-adjacent communities national advocacy group on airport noise impacts.
[Jason Schwarz]:
Thank you and good evening everybody. I’m going to try to keep our portion of the meeting to about 15 minutes so I will probably be talking a little bit fast just to keep on track. The majority of the meeting we’re hoping will be discussion and Q&A with you all.
As was said, Vire is the team that you’re working with tonight. When we were hired in 2018 to provide review and comment on the scoping of the master plan, we were actually operating under different company names. So if you look back at 2018 you’ll see different company names but the same names and faces. We’ve been working on this project for quite some time.
Our role in this – we’re working directly for the city and our role is really to advocate for the city and the residents, particularly those who are impacted by SeaTac airport and the operations and will be with the growth of operations as planned and forecast through the SAMP.
[Question and Answer Session]
[Audience Member 1]:
My first question would be – what has been done to engage young people from our community who were affected? I live right next to the high school and this morning when I woke up as I was getting ready for work, I counted a plane every minute until I got tired of counting at 7:30. That kind of learning environment for the young people in our community is a real inequity that our community bears the burden of. So I’d like to know what’s been done with students to make sure that their voice is heard and not just about mitigating indoor noise pollution. We need our kids to get outside to be healthy in the outdoors.
[Audience Member 2]:
You speak about mitigation – my question is: the mitigation equals economics, and who is going to bear the burden of financing the mitigation in all these four or five areas that have been identified?
[Jason Schwarz]:
That would be funded by the port as part of this project. The mitigation would come through the port. And as it relates to the first comment about young people and the impacts on students and youth in the community, I think that’s a terrific comment to include in your comment letter to the FAA.
[Linda Akey., Burien City Council]:
Sorry to crash the party in DeMoine, but I wasn’t able to attend all of the meetings they had the previous week. My question has to do with my understanding that the SAMP has not recognized some of the roadways that are impactful to the airport, and one of those roadways is the expansion of 509. This expansion is going to increase traffic significantly around the airport. My question is: are the comments that we’ll be able to make also going to be for what we believe are exclusions in the SAMP plan, or can we only comment on things that are identified within the SAMP plan, such as the 509 expansion?
[Jason Schwarz]:
I would absolutely recommend if you see something that wasn’t covered or is omitted or wasn’t covered sufficiently, to note that in your comments to the port. I’m not familiar with 509, not being from that area, but if that’s not addressed as a traffic issue that’s going to be addressed, I would absolutely comment on that as something that was missed in the environmental assessment.
[Sandra Loer, Burien Resident]:
I’ve been a Burien resident for 50 years and certainly have experienced my share of increasing air pollution as well as noise. I didn’t hear anything about air quality tonight. I heard a lot about noise. Our major airport pollutants of concern – we have air toxics, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, ozone, and ultrafine particulate matter. There’s been major significant studies done by the UW, the Washington State Department of Health, and King County that shows the south end has statistically significant poorer health than the rest of King County.
The last air quality study done was in 1996. It only costs you guys half a million dollars to do a dispersion analysis using models or air quality studies using physical instruments, and these two tests validate and support each other. The EPA wants to know what’s going on in surrounding communities’ site-specific receptors – schools, nursing homes, daycares, etc. I want to know why you are skipping over the idea of air quality and just focusing on noise. Is that because you might be – the airport as it stands now might be violating the Clean Air Act?
I want everyone to know that I’ve written an article that’s going to be published tomorrow in the Burien News. It is entitled “How do we know if the SAMP is really sustainable?” Everyone needs to write the FAA, the Port of Seattle, and the EPA, and I have listed those email addresses in my article because we need your comments to be transparent. Let it all hang out – there shouldn’t be any strict guidelines about your commentary. We are we the people. You are the public. Write all three entities, CC everybody.
[Moderator Rebecca]:
Just as a reminder for everybody, Jason and Emily are not with the Port – they are consultants hired on our behalf.
[Jason Schwarz]:
The short answer is we didn’t skip it – it was one of the four areas that we were asked to focus on. As you may or may not know, I think we had three weeks’ notice from the port that the review or comment period was very abbreviated, and there’s a lot of content. As I recall for the air quality, they said it didn’t exceed air quality standards. I’m not an expert in air quality. We just reviewed the analysis and I have to basically take it at face value because I don’t have the equipment or the time to come out and double-check the work or to model it. I agree 100% – if they’re not doing an adequate job of the assessment of the air quality impacts, definitely comment on that. We’re not discouraging you to say your peace in any way – I’m just encouraging if you want meaningful comment, comment that can actually change things, just try to really stick to the facts.
[Joe Dusenbury, North Hill Resident]:
I’m one of the city’s representatives to the STAR committee. This is a comment and question for you, Jason, about noise. I’ve noticed in attending the STAR meetings that the port does have a very extensive monitoring program for noise, and we get regular reports – again, pretty detailed reports about the number of exceedances. They break it down by the airline and cargo versus passenger, all kinds of data. But the program is totally voluntary, and the report is every – they report out to the airlines every three months. So if there’s an exceedance, it might be three months before they sit down and talk to the airlines.
We can get involved in this process and we can have all kinds of input about noise, but if the program – if the whole way they measure this and enforce it is totally voluntary, how effective is that going to be? And another question is: in your experience, are there other airports in the country that have noise monitoring programs where there’s actual teeth to the enforcement of those exceedances?
[Jason Schwarz]:
I could respond to that question for an hour because it’s one of my favorite topics – noise and Fly Quiet. I know I’m limited on my time so I’ll just say, generally speaking, the flight procedures and the noise abatement procedures are voluntary per Federal Regulations. There are some ways to add teeth to that, for example by designing flight procedures that are specifically community-friendly or noise abatement-friendly, and then when the air traffic controllers assign that to the pilot and the pilot flies it, it will be the procedure that you’re looking for.
Fly Quiet programs like the one you’re describing are typically voluntary. As a company, we do work in the Fly Quiet program space and more importantly, as a noise manager, I’ve developed programs for airports that I was working for. I’d say that there are ways to improve the program. What you’re describing – the three-month report – is not the way that I would recommend it be done. I’d be happy to talk to you offline or talk through the staff to explore that further.
I will say quickly that as a part of the initial SAMP review that we did on the front end, we did do some modeling and make some recommendations for flight procedure changes to mitigate noise. So those are out there and a part of this process already. If you are not familiar with them, you can go back to the original documentation and look and make comments on that if you like what you see.
[Susan White, DeMoine Resident]:
I’ve been a longtime resident of DeMoine and I was also part of the third runway battle at the time. All the cities were all kind of more united in a way, I guess. But it is really true – it just seems like we send in all these comments and we’ve done this for over so many years and who’s really listening? It seems like we go through these processes, we also see these studies – I don’t know how many millions of dollars are spent on these, but at some point I think we all feel we’re just not heard. You know, grateful that you are representing the city and that we’re all here tonight, but I hope somebody is listening because with the air quality – my grandchildren went to St. Phils. I mean there’s airplanes every two seconds dropping all this pollution everywhere right over that school. So many of us are impacted and we do need help.
[Will Scharf, DeMoine Resident]:
I’ve been a resident of DeMoine for 24 years, and this question is directed to Jason Schwarz. I see that there’s been a lot of refinement around this 65 decibel metric for the magnitude of the noise. What I heard you also talk about was frequency. You’re using a more community-friendly metric talking about the frequency of noise. What I didn’t hear was the thresholds around what those metrics are. So where can I find the information on the thresholds for the frequency of noise, not the magnitude of the noise?
[Jason Schwarz]:
The supplemental metrics there isn’t a specific standard – there’s not a federal standard.
[Will Scharf]:
Why not?
[Jason Schwarz]:
I can’t speak to federal government and what they do and don’t do.
[Will Scharf]:
They have one very highly refined metric which you give them – there’s a 1.5 grace period there from 65, you can go up to 66.5. So it’s been very refined but they’re overlooking the frequency. That’s a huge gap.
[Jason Schwarz]:
Technically – and I’m not an advocate for the FAA – but technically they would argue that the DNL metric does include frequency and magnitude into one. If you increase their frequency, the DNL will get larger. I’m not personally in favor of using DNL, but they don’t ask me for input.
[Emily Tranter]:
That’s FAA and your Congressional Representatives that can change that metric. There’s been a lot of work over decades to study those metrics and to advocate for increased standards for different kinds of metrics beyond the DNL. The FAA is still only using DNL. I think there’s a lot of folks that are impacted like you and your neighbors, and there are a lot of folks that are in the advocacy space that have been talking about this for quite a long time. To your question of why not – I think it is a very complicated long process and we are, I think we wish we’d made more progress on it at this point, but it’s just what our federal standards are right now.
[Will Scharf]:
But if these supplemental metrics have been used to inform and educate the communities, how are we supposed to interpret that? To the gentleman’s point earlier, what are the best practices across other airports? We need some additional context because if you just come out and say “Here’s the supplemental metrics” – great, is that good, bad, or different? We need that context. If there’s no thresholds that have been established by the FAA, you’re telling a community something that has absolutely no meaning. How do we interpret the data? You’re telling them the data but how do we interpret that?
[Jim Allardice]:
I’ll take a stab at that too. One of my favorite phrases is “once you’ve seen one airport, you’ve seen one airport; once you’ve seen one community, you’ve seen one community.” We blanket the DCA area now at all three airports. The supplemental metrics that we use are in conjunction with the communities and what they feel is meaningful to them. Since there is no national standard, however, one of the metrics that we use quite often is number of events above 55 dB. That seems to be a pretty widely accepted metric. The reason for that is 55 dB is less than the 65 DNL – it’s a lower threshold, and so the number of times an individual observer or a point is affected by that decibel level or higher seems to be a good method of comparing noise, specifically before and after a mitigation.
One of the things that we just got done doing at DCA Airport, and they just did some modifications at Baltimore Washington Airport as well, and we’re in the process of doing a before and after comparison using those metrics because they’re more meaningful to the community than DNL. It’s not universally accepted, but for the communities that we’ve worked with, it seems logical to them and it’s been an effective metric for the community to understand what the impacts are.
[Morris Gee Westgard]:
I live on 246th, which is just a little south of Highline Community College and about maybe 30 yards below elementary school. And it is noise – I’m one mile walk to Saltwater State Park and all the campers and people complain about the noise down there. I’m going “you need to come to my house.” It’s every few minutes and you cannot talk on the patio because you can’t hear the person on the other side of the table. It’s pretty bad. And thinking there’s a school just 30 yards above me, and Highland Schools they’re closer to the airport. So yeah, that’s an issue and I like to hear, so please help us.
[Bill Linscott, Marina District Resident]:
I live down in the Marina District here. I did a lot of flying during my career and I only found one airport where I observed noticeably methods that reduced the sound and noise, and that was Orange County, California. They take off, they get up, they throttle back until they’re out over the ocean. Is that some of the procedures that might have been mentioned in your recommendations when you talk about changes in procedures that address noise, particularly at night? I would think that kind of thing would be helpful, and I’m not sure how Orange County pulled that off if it’s a voluntary thing.
[Jim Allardice]:
Orange County is unique – it’s been brought up quite a few times. The FAA nationwide has two standard noise abatement departure procedures. NADP1 is a noise abatement departure procedure in close to the airport, and NADP2 is a noise abatement departure procedure that helps out further away from the airport. One of the things that we do when we go in to study an airport is compare those two and find out which one would be better for that particular airport or that particular runway at that particular airport.
The one that they’re doing at Orange County is more akin to the NADP1, which is close in to the airport that gets them higher sooner and throttles back. That is a national standard, and they do use that at various airports and/or various runways. The specifics of Orange County – that was prior to the Airport Noise and Capacity Act. Before that, there were like curfews that they could have in place. They can’t do those things nowadays because the federal government says basically if we give you money at your airport, then you’ve got to keep your airport open at all hours and all times and let anybody come and go that wants to come and go.
Everybody takes money from the federal government. For whatever reason, Orange County is unique and they’re grandfathered in because they already had it when that Act was passed, and now nobody else can get the same thing. There is a minuscule chance via one vehicle that you can go and jump through hoops and try for years and years, but nobody’s been able to tackle that since that act existed.
But there are other mitigations, and we’ve been very effective at implementing those at various airports. So it’s possible to get some meaningful, measurable mitigations.
[Kate Richardson]:
I live in Gregory Heights, which is three miles as the crow flies from the third runway, and I’d like to know what entity or entities determine when the airport has reached its carrying capacity such that no further growth is possible? Or can communities look forward to being mitigated out of existence?
[Jim Allardice]:
The absolute capacity of an airport is dependent upon the runways. How much concrete an airport has is what determines the ultimate capacity of the airport. The other piece that is involved with that is air traffic separation standards. There is a finite level at which they cannot exceed under current technology, current separation standards, and current runway capacity. I don’t know what that number is off the top of my head, but it’s just not physically possible to continue to grow exponentially forever. So there is a limit – I just don’t know what that is right now.
[Jason Schwarz]:
Just to add to that, there’s constraints related to the capacity of the airspace, as we talked about the air side runways, taxiways, the terminal, and the landside. The unfortunate answer, and I’m just being completely honest, what airports will typically do in conjunction with the FAA is to continue to expand capacity to meet demand. So if your demand continues to go up, the airport in conjunction with the FAA would want to continue to expand capacity to meet that regional demand. Whether that’s right or wrong, I’m not commenting on, but that’s basically how things work. That’s why you see the third runway added, that’s why you see airfield enhancements and terminal enhancements – they’re trying to meet that demand.
[Meeting Moderator/Rebecca Deming]:
Thank you everyone. Don’t forget we’ve got copies of the PowerPoint at the back and the handout at the back that has the website and the address for submitting comments. Thank you everyone.