Overview

The draft Sea-Tac Communities Plan (STCP) (known as “the Redbook” was delivered to the King County Council and Port of Seattle Commissioners in January 1975 after eighteen months of work and a $641,000 grant from the FAA. The authors were the Policy Advisory Committee, a twelve member group of citizens, King County, Port staff, educators and academics led by Director of Aviation Don Shay.

Background

The STCP was a response to public outcry over the dramatic increases in noise and pollution following the opening of the Second Runway (now known as 16C or the center runway.)

This HistoryLink ¹article does a pretty good job of condensing the situation into a few sentences. What the article does not mention is that this was a unique moment in American environmental law. The STCP was developed shortly after the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA.) To put it bluntly: the regulatory climate of the era made it much easier for communities to sue airports. And boy did they ever.

Significance

From the airport communities perspective the STCP may be the single most important document in history. In the end it became the community mitigation for the Second Runway–and the only meaningful voluntary mitigation of any expansion in the history of Sea-Tac Airport.

But the Sea-Tac Communities Plan was meant to be much more. It was a comprehensive long term plan to address both the needs of residents and realistic growth forecasts of the airport. It was the first, and only time, the Port, the prevailing jurisdictions, citizens and multiple federal agencies (eg. Federal Aviation Administration, Housing and Urban Development) worked collaboratively.

From the Peat, Marwick first year audit of the plan, The Sea-Tac Success Story

As one of the first airport sponsors in the country to be sued… the Port had little or no guidance from elsewhere as to how to deal with the problem(s). In the absence of such guidance, what may be termed a “let them sue” approach was essentially followed by the Port during the period from 1957 to 1972. Under this approach, every lawsuit was contested in court. If the Port won, no further action would be taken…

Only a first step…

Readers often find the language of the STCP somewhat underwhelming. It was never meant to be a detailed set of regulations and policy prescriptions. Rather it was meant to be the beginning of a process that would include comprehensive noise monitoring, air quality monitoring, revenue sharing, land use–every aspect of community impacts we now consider crucial in any airport development issue. And all of it would be developed with input from community advisory groups.

The first step was the adoption of the plan in 1976 by the King Council as Ordinance #2883 and by the Port Commission as Resolution #2626. Each document acknowledges the STCP as the shared comprehensive land use plan for the area.

The most well-known next step was another three year group effort resulting in the Highline Community Plan of 1979. It’s purpose was to develop an implementation of the land use portion of the STCP.

Not exactly to plan…

But no part of the STCP implementation went exactly ‘to plan’. The one major milestone reached that looks anything like the original vision is what is now known as North Sea-Tac Park. Frankly, the FAA and the Port of Seattle were so ‘collaborative’ in the beginning because they had to be so. As responsibility for environmental regulation of airports was transferred from the EPA and to the FAA, both the Port of Seattle and the FAA became tougher for all communities to deal with.

*Still, what remains of the STCP is the single biggest compensation and community benefit in Sea-Tac Airport history.

One key takeaway is that both the Port and the FAA considered the agreement to be reasonable and workable. Don Shay was no tree-hugger.  The document provides straight forward cost assessments and more importantly, ways to pay for everything. The STCP puts the lie to the argument that the Port is always financially constrained by FAA rules from doing more.

The STCP was far from perfect. Aspects of the Second Runway were ruinous for many homeowners and businesses. Highline Schools, once considered among the best public school districts in the state, has never recovered.

It’s not just that reality fell so far short of the vision. And it’s not that almost no one remembers it today–though it was less than fifty years ago.  From our point of view, the most troubling thing about the STCP is that almost every resident and local elected today would struggle to believe that such a working group could have existed in the first place.

Summary Of Key Recommendations

In a letter to the King County Council, Don Shay presents the twelve key recommendations which became the roadmap for next steps. Most of which were carried forward… until they weren’t.

The STCP was negotiated in a world which no longer exists. But that has nothing to do with the feasibility of such an agreement. It just means that every stakeholder has been responding to individual and perverse incentives rather than compromising to do what is best for the communities.

Over time, both the FAA and the Port have become more difficult negotiating partners. But that is not because they have to be. It is because transferring environmental regulatory authority to the FAA gave them more options to choose profit over community–and they took all of them.

And in 1976 “the Highline Community”, meant “King County”. Now, it means  six separate municipalities who frequently squabble over individual concerns rather than coming together with the understanding that the airport is the only issue. That too was a choice.

In short, the STCP was the right system. It may require more will now to carry forward in the current environment, but regardless it’s still the right system.

The Sea-Tac Communities Plan (1975)

• Part 1 Overview Of The Plan (explainer)
• Part 2 Use Of The Report (explainer)
• Part 3 Background (explainer)
• Part 4 Trends And Forecasts (explainer)
• Part 5 The Environment (explainer)
  • †Chapter 5.8 Community Attitudes Survey (explainer)
  • †1974 Noise Study (explainer)
• Part 6 Plans, Policies And Programs (explainer)
  • Chapter 6.6.5 Reinforcement Area Maps
    (these are the proposed land uses)
    • North
    • South
    • East 
    • West
  • Chapter 6.7 Map Supplement (explainer)
• Part 7 Implementation (explainer)
• Part 8 References (explainer)
• Handwritten Project Cost Worksheets not technically a part of the official document, but tightly related (explainer)

Reading through any government document from 1975 can be almost like slogging through Shakespeare. The contemporary reader will be confronted with any number of acronyms and groups and terms like ‘ADAP’, Forward Thrust, ‘Zone 3’ and ‘Post Plan’ that will likely be unfamiliar. We’re working on it. However, despite those challenges, it is otherwise in plain language and very well-written. Some of the science may be outdated (ultrafine particulates were not measurable at the time) but all the main policy concerns it discusses are the same as one would discuss today, including land use, economics and environment. And the STCP does so with much greater clarity than almost every paper we’ve read concerning more recent airport expansions.

A note on the scan. There were 150 numbered copies in three ring binders with the plastic cover above. We have three (3) complete copies. The Port of Seattle has another. The Washington State Archives has several sections from another copy. We’ve also seen PDFs of various fragments on-line. As far as we know, this is the only scan of a complete version. Apparently, there are differences in material between copies. We chose to present this one because it’s the last version date we’ve found before the initial presentation of the Plan to the Port Commission, King County Council and public. Finally, all OCRed documents suffer from various ‘glitches, this one more than most due to the high number of graphics and different type styles.

Brochure

A full-color piece distributed throughout the airport communities as part of the outreach program. If you read nothing else, read this as it describes the aspirations quite well.

Important Milestones

Related

*We are careful to distinguish community benefit. The Port of Seattle, Highline Schools and the majority of electeds will absolutely gush about the $150,000,000 agreement for schools, the storm water systems and various economic development and non-profit grant programs. The careful reader will note several features of all these payments: other than the school insulation, the sum total of all these ‘grants’ has been only about $1,000,000 (the vast majority of these being paid from our own property taxes) and none of these went to the communities. At best they are small programs eg. tree planting or to help design a building at the Des Moines Marina.

†This section was developed independently of the original plan and outside the PAC. This version is from the Port of Seattle’s copy.

¹We’ve made no secret that we’re usually reluctant to quote from HistoryLink on matters concerning Sea-Tac airport. But this particular article does a pretty good job of succinctly describing the circumstances leading up to its creation