[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
So today I will be, if I see things are kind of lagging a little bit, we’ll encourage us to move forward at a more timely pace. My name is Andres Montilla and joined as always by my colleague and project manager, Cheryl Swab, who will be taking some notes and helping me facilitate today. As a reminder, this is a Zoom facilitation platform. It means that’s a webinar panelist in style format. Start members and guest speakers are the panelists. They can speak during the meeting, can chat with facilitators, guest speakers, and lead board staff. And then observers are the attendees and can see speakers and presentation materials, but not visible to start members or presenters and the chat is not available. We will have a public comment towards the end where we will make the commenters temporary panelists when it’s their turn. And at that time, folks will be asked to turn on the video and unmute, and everybody will be able to see and hear public commenters when called on. As you can see here, our full start member roster is here. A reminder again that the chat is only by and to start members, facilitators, and panelists. Our expectations and ground rules of start is for you all to participate, to focus on the subject at hand, to represent your constituency and respect diverse views and communicate fairly. Our ground rules are to participate fully, honestly, and fairly speak respectfully, keep an open mind, acknowledge all participants, allow people to share without fear of criticism. Our facilitation rules are around neutrality, transparency, clarity. We’ll make sure that each voice is heard. We’ll begin and end on time, and we will commit to clear follow-up. Again, we have two people signed up right now for public comment, and those will be limited to two minutes each, and we’ll get to that at the end of the meeting. Per our policy, start meetings are not officially or will not be officially recorded or audio or video recorded. We did have somebody request to record the meeting, and per our rules, if anybody wishes to audio or video record a meeting, they are required to notify the facilitator prior to the beginning recording, and that has happened, and so somebody will be recording tonight’s meeting, so as folks are participating, keep that in mind. And any recordings by participants or members of the public are not considered official or necessarily accurate recordings of the meeting. And with that, I’ll turn it over to Arif.
[Arif Ghouse (Port of Seattle)]
Thank you, Andreas, and good evening, everyone. I would like to start by thanking everyone for attending tonight’s meeting. In fact, since this is the last meeting of the year, I want to take a moment to thank all of you for your participation on start over the past 12 months. This work isn’t easy or as fast as we would like, but I continue to believe that we all can benefit from coming together to work on difficult conversations and to find opportunities to progress. So for tonight’s agenda, we have some very special guests with us. First of all, we have Maria Bichet. Maria, I apologize if I’m butchering your last name. It’s a beautiful name, but I… Thank you. And Maria is the chairperson of the LaGuardia Airport Committee, and we also have Aaron Toffler, who’s the executive director of the Massport Community Advisory Committee, and Joseph Burt, who’s a team manager with the FAA. So Maria and Aaron will be talking about a very exciting roundtable of roundtable effort that they’re initiating, and Joe will present on the FAA’s portal for submitting proposed flight path changes. And this is indeed a busy time of year, particularly for airports, and so I know we are all appreciative of the three of you presenting tonight. And thank you as well to the port staff tonight that we’ll be presenting. Eric Schinfield, John Flanagan, Tom Fagerström, and Sarah Cox. So going back to tonight’s agenda, we have several agenda items tonight, so where it’s important that we hear directly from you, the staff members. Start works by consensus, so every action or direction we take needs to reflect the will of the membership. First up, as I mentioned, Maria and Aaron are going to talk about the impressive work they have engaged into launching the roundtable of airport roundtables. So after they present, please ask questions, share your thoughts on whether you believe STARK should consider becoming part of this larger roundtable. It’s something the port will only pursue if it’s clear, or if it’s clear it is of interest to all of the entities that comprise STARK. In addition, we would love to hear your thoughts on how such an entity could be most effective and impactful. Joe will present next on the FAS instrument flight procedures process. The port has made no determination about the extent of its involvement in the process that allows an individual or party. Shut off the Nord. And folks, please mute if you’re not talking. Sorry, go ahead. No problem. Yeah, I was just saying that the ports made no determination on our involvement in the process that allows an individual party to submit to the FAA a proposed flight path change. So we need to hear directly from STARK members about what they think the port’s law should be in the process. And additionally, if you think there’s a role for STARK in evaluating submissions to the FAA. Finally, Andres will revisit STARK’s 2025-2026 priorities, which were finalized back at STARK’s August meeting this year. We won’t be entertaining additional, adding new priorities just to STARK’s framework. Rather, we want to capture what priorities need to be emphasized as the gender items at a future STARK meeting or meetings. So again, your feedback is going to be key. So let me thank our outside speakers again for being with us tonight. And all of us at the port wish you a very happy holidays. So we look forward to continuing our work together in 2026. So with that, I’ll hand it back to Andres.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
All right. Thank you. So let’s go ahead and get going here. And I will turn it over to Maria. And Maria, I think you are just going to speak a little.
[Maria Bichet (LaGuardia Airport Committee Chair)]
I don’t think you have any other PowerPoint. So maybe I’ll stop sharing so we can kind of see everybody. And then I’ll turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Andres. Good evening, everyone. Just wanted to thank Arif, Andres, Cheryl, and Marco. Thank you for the invitation. Greetings from very cold and snowy East Coast. My name is Maria Betsy. I’m the chairperson of the LaGuardia Airport Committee and co-chairperson of the New York Community Aviation Roundtable, which is known as NICAR. The roundtable is comprised of two airport committees, LaGuardia and JFK. Each have a chairperson. We come together as the co-chair. And we also, we meet separately and we also come together quarterly as a full roundtable. I am joined this evening by my colleague, Aaron Topla, Executive Director of Massport Community Advisory Committee in Boston, Massachusetts, probably even colder and snowier than where I am. Aaron is here to make sure and jump in at any time that I may mistake or confuse anyone, and I appreciate that. So together, Aaron and I serve on the steering committee of the roundtable of roundtables. And it’s hosted by a great, a really terrific not-for-profit organization called Quiet Communities, Inc., and it’s Quiet American Skies Program. The organization has several programs, one of which is the Quiet American Skies. Dr. Jamie Banks is the founder and president. So how we got to where we are is that here in New York, after meeting for quite some time, we were contacted by probably the most premier noise expert in New York, Dr. Arlene Bronzehaft, who very sadly recently passed away. She reached out. Our then chairperson of the LaGuardia Committee was extremely happy to be, to be, have been reached out by Dr. Bronzehaft, and she introduced us to this wonderful organization. And it is a, it is comprised of just top professionals, engineers, scientists, medical professionals, who have a collaborative approach to solving problems. And we were very eager to join forces with such a group of people who could, who could enhance the efforts of NICAR. I found myself on the policy committee of this group, and we were exploring different initiatives that we could start. And we were thinking about the role, the roles of roundtables across the country and what, you know, what separates a roundtable from some of these really wonderful and dedicated advocacy groups, you know, across the country. And what it turns out is that roundtables have the ear and participation, most likely in most cases, with airport operators, airlines, and the FAA, which is extremely important. If you’re going to try and make change, you must, you must work with these groups of people in order to make that change and to develop a working relationship. So, you know, so how did we get here? How did I get here? I am just a person who found themselves living under a noise corridor without any knowledge. I woke up one morning at 6am with a plane flying so low and so loud over my home. Being from New York, all we can think of was heaven forbid, you know, another 9-11. And I ran to the TV. I was trying to figure out what in the world was going on. Nothing was on the TV. Thank goodness. This continued for quite a while. I started to reach out. Anyone else complaining about airplane noise, which we had never had like this. It turns out, after a very long time of trying to figure out what was going on, it turned out in New York there was an airspace redesign. And they, in order to de-conflict the airspace and in order to build LaGuardia and JFK to reach capacity, they needed to make some changes in order to have the necessary separation between the airports. One of the changes they made was a PBN flight procedure, departure procedure from LaGuardia Airport, which flew right directly over residential communities right at the foot of the airport and then continued all the way out to where I am about 7 miles away from the airport. In any event, the outpouring for relief was so profound in the New York area that our elected officials, our community boards, our civic organizations, nobody knew what was going on. So it turned out that with a lot of press conferences and a lot of time had gone by, our then Governor Cuomo said something needs to be done. So he created a New York community aviation roundtable to look into, identify, figure out what was going on and make recommendations. At the same time, he issued a mandate to create part 150 studies done at both airports. So here we are. Now we have a roundtable. What do we do? So we had meetings, we try and create agendas that bring awareness to the problem. Our elected officials can hear what’s going on. We also wanted to educate the public. How did we get here? Why are we experiencing this noise? All of that. So in any event, getting back to the policy committee acquired communities, someone, perhaps myself, we said, you know, if there are other roundtables across the country, how much more effective could we be if we spoke with one voice? So we shared each of those experiences and the idea was thought to be worthwhile. So the first thing we had to do was to figure out where did these airports exist. So it took time to organize and to determine and come up with a list of various airports. And then once we had that list, we had to reach out to each airport roundtable, explaining that we were thinking about putting together a high level meeting of an intimate group who were involved in dealing with this problem for quite a while, experienced, and to have the ability to share information with each other. So it took a while to put this together. Incredibly so, every roundtable that we reached out to expressed enthusiasm for such an idea. It had never been done before. And that gave us the impetus to keep going and to keep moving on. Eventually, we had enough people who said they were interested. And so we set a date. We had a date back in October. And we put this group together. And I just want to give you a little bit of an idea of how we structured it and what the outcome was and what some of the things were that we discussed. And believe it or not, actually not surprising at all, much more commonality than you would expect. I used to say years ago to our congresswoman, connecting the dots. You know, you could pick up a newspaper, whether it be in New York, Boston, Chicago, out on the West Coast. It sounds like you’re talking about your own area. There was a tremendous amount of commonality. So once we identified the various roundtables, we received encouragement from people who wanted to put this together. We set a date. Actually, I’m sorry, the date was actually November 13, not that long ago. And we had a meeting goal. The goal was that we were going to explore ways that roundtables might benefit from connecting with each other, sharing learning experiences and our expertise. Some people have been at this problem for 20 years. Tremendous amount of information to be shared. So just to give you an idea, nine airports were represented from across the country who attended this meeting in November. We had Boston, Mass Poor Community Aviation Committee, Chicago O’Hare, DC Metroplex, BWI, Community Roundtable, Los Angeles Community Noise Roundtable, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Noise Oversight Committee, New York Community Aviation Roundtable. We had LaGuardia and JF Kennedy Airports, Ronald Reagan, Washington National Airport, Seattle CTEC, Marco Milanese, Ryan and Eric Schinfeld were able to attend. So it turns out that those nine airports actually represented 219 roundtable participants. And over 100 communities across the United States. We found that we sent out prior to the meeting a questionnaire just to get some basic information from everybody. And not surprisingly, the work that was being conducted by each of these airport roundtables included, obviously, noise mitigation, support of the well-being of impacted and affected communities, consultation on flight paths, engaging aviation consultants, addressing environmental impacts, health and safety, collaborating with airports and the aviation industry, generating recommendations, alternative procedures, and then giving input on policy. Some airport roundtables had elected officials, consisting at the federal, state, city, local levels. Others did not. So, but in any event, each roundtable seemed to be quite involved with affecting policy. So, the idea was, you know, how might a collaboration essentially be helpful? Well, we started the meeting with two taped messages from Congressman Tom Swazi and Congressman Woman Grace Meng, who are both on the Quiet Skies Caucus. Each gave a brief update on the caucuses activities, hopeful messages, appreciation of the work being done by roundtables across the country. They definitely acknowledged that. And the hopes that by working together and identifying that we could even be more effective. So, you know, we asked the meeting itself, honestly, was an incredible experience of getting to know each other. It was a good first meeting. You know, you can understand that people are, you know, a little skittish, a little nervous about, you know, what is this involved? Why would I want to participate in this? Is this really worth my time? And a couple of hours into the meeting, we came up with a very long list of ideas and common thoughts. I’m not going to go through each one of them, but I want to bring up some highlights. Those included, and I say probably say number one concern, comparing notes on working with the FAA, especially air traffic control issues. I think one of the roundtable heads opened up the meeting with the word frustration, and everyone was very quick to jump in on that. Understanding the importance of working with the FAA, Airlines, Port Authority, but that there is certainly a level of frustration that we all encounter. We also talked about finding ways to change the dynamics of the discussion of noise from politics and economics to possibly public health, which might be more appropriate. Looking into incentives, awards programs, like the Fly Quiet program. We have a Fly Quiet program in New York at both airports, possibly developing a strategy to get the FAA and Congress to press for changes in legislation that can deal with both air and noise pollution. One of the questions we asked was, your mandate for the roundtable might be, and most likely is about noise mitigation, do you ever bring up health impacts? And across the board, every single roundtable said yes, we do. They bring it up. We talked about developing, possibly developing a strategy of working and getting the FAA to consider this, our elected officials to propose proper legislation. We talked about who in the communities is looking out for the people who are repeatedly hurt by air and noise pollution. We developed a shared roster of consultants. Several out port roundtables mentioned that they had some positive experience dealing with an independent outside aviation consultant, which have been acting as ways to enhance the efforts of roundtables. One roundtable in particular in the DC area had a very positive outcome where they were able to actually put into place a new procedure. It took a good number of years. It was very expensive, but they said it was very worthwhile. Another roundtable said we want to find ways to build a positive relationship with the FAA because we need to work with them. People in general just said I want to learn, love to learn more about how people are feeling and what their thinking is about new and emerging technologies. Getting data can be a significant challenge and then it’s useless and old sometimes by the time we get it. Chicago uses noise monitors over the whole area and reviewing the data. We have noise monitors of course here in New York, but the question is when the port authority collects the information, you know, what do we do with it? We know that it’s gathered and it needs to be, but we feel that more should be done with it. We found out here in New York that there is such a thing called virtual noise monitoring that we are looking into. It turns out that the port authority is already working with this group called Vianeer who is able to put together a grid and it makes it possible so that you’re not dependent on a piece of equipment to collect this. This is actually where you give the software actually is analyzing a data point, an address, something like that that they can hone in and collect information on noise without actually having to have a physical monitor in someone’s backyard or in a public space. Maria, sorry to interrupt, just want to do a quick time check on, yeah, and I know that if Erin wants to say anything, I know folks might have also have questions. Yeah, go ahead. Very, very last thing in summary, what do we do next? What are the next steps? And what we came up with was the possibility of a single common project, developing common data repository across all the airports, coalition building obviously, seek changes to the FAA noise policy, perhaps getting away from the 6065 DNL, I think everyone agrees, is not accurately depicting the lived experience of people when it blends in time when they’re quiet times we need more, more accurate noise measuring which is going on with the FAA’s policy review, helping each other keeping up with science and research, more conversation about metrics, and then focusing on air and noise pollution together that you can’t simply look at one without looking at the other. So, I’m sorry for the very long winded, but as you can tell, we were pretty excited about it and in summary, it was a great first start. In fact, there was enough enthusiasm that we have planned a second get together for on February 12, 2026. And so far, everyone who participated in the first one has agreed to continue on for follow up discussions, where we may actually identify, perhaps in small bites, a topic that we can work on together. But we feel that it’s important to continue sharing information and that it’s worthwhile. So Aaron, if you could please add anything or correct anything that I may have misstated.
[Aaron Toffler (Massport CAC Executive Director)]
Nothing to correct I will take one minute for a high level just a couple of thoughts first. Thank you for having us. This work is not easy or fast. I’m sure many of you have been at it for for quite a long time as well. I just want to say that this this idea of round table of round tables was sort of a force multiplier idea we thought that it would be good to share information with each other to potentially get more effective at what we’re all trying to do and frankly for my group the Massport Community Advisory Committee, we’re interested in pursuing a project with other groups around the country because we think that if we can get consistent data across the country we might be able to make some policy changes. All groups are constituted slightly differently. As Maria said somewhere a little skittish about joining. We wanted to have the initial conversations so that people could meet each other and determine whether or not they wanted to move forward so I think it’s a great thing we’re going to meet again in February. Happy to answer any questions that you might have about the initiative.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
Thank you Aaron. Thank you Maria. I see Joe’s hand up. Joe, go ahead. You’re on mute Joe.
[Joe Dusenberry]
Sorry question and comment for our guests. Comment. This is my second year on our start committee and this has been the best 30 minutes so far. My question is, do you, the makeup of your round table you mentioned I think the LaGuardia was mentioned. Are you, are your members all from the the airport and the communities right around LaGuardia, or are they citywide? Is it a citywide group?
Oh, and then finally, it sounds like this was a group, the round table was created by the by the state or the city. Was there, did they provide funding for your group?
So the round table in New York was created by Governor Cuomo through the port authority of New York, New Jersey. Our airport round table is consists of elected officials at the federal New York state and New York City levels. Then we also expanded to the community boards in New York City, each area within the fire boroughs has a community board that is advisory, but is very, very significant whenever any changes are made in the New York area. And then we have, we have two citizen members who are part of the of each of the airport committees. The idea I believe was that you need in New York they felt that elected officials who represented the most impacted communities needed to hear what was going on in their districts. And that by listening and being educated and hearing the very terrible impact that somebody that the PBM flight procedure had in the New York area, that they would then take that information in order to draft legislation. That would that would help that they would also act as liaison with the FAA when needed. So the, I believe that was the thought process. We have, we get extremely good representation at each one of our meetings. We find that our elected officials will either attend themselves, or they will send a representative from their office. In my case, I actually represent Congresswoman Grace Meng. Her office is so stretched that some of the elected officials say that they want to volunteer constituent, who’s actually impacted by this, who’s willing to work and work on this problem, represent them. And I guess I haven’t embarrassed her enough. They still keep me on. That’s, that’s how in New York anyway, it was felt that the elected officials could then hear what was going on and then go back out and then, you know, draft legislation that that could help and then work with the airlines and the Port Authority. And there is no, the only fun that everyone is a volunteer, except, you know, the elected officials, we haven’t paid facilitator, but that is the only person who’s actually paid on the round table.
[Barton DeLacy]
Thanks, Maria. Pardon. Hi, Maria. I’m in the same verb as Joe. We’re one of the things we’re trying to figure out are optimal mitigation strategies. And I’m curious if this bringing together the round table of round tables, are you able to identify best practices yet that you could advise us on who’s done it best who’s what are, you know, I think that’s could really be a great value. Are you that far along yet or is that on your agenda?
[Maria Bichet]
Barton, thank you for asking that. The first meeting that we had was generally to get to know each other and to have an open, honest, frank discussion. You know, what could we do if we continued having this dialogue. I have to tell you that we have come up. Well, I can give you some experience and Aaron can jump in as well. We’ve always identified long, short term and long term goals. All right. Short term goals we feel that must be implemented are is more flight dispersion, getting away from having a noise car that the same people over and over again, experiencing up to 18 straight hours a day, sometimes even longer at one minute intervals. We want more flight dispersion. The FAA will call that shifting noise. We call it sharing noise. We bear the burden of two enormous airports in the same borough of Queens in New York. The same people cannot bear the entire burden. The other short term goal was to try and get the planes at higher altitudes faster. And I want I really want to give you a hopeful thing on that. The long term, the long term goal, in my opinion, is really going to be aviation technology, whether it be technology that allows for less amount of separation between airports and big metropolitan metropolitan areas that don’t necessarily mandate the same flight depart the departure procedures over and over again, that it gives for air traffic control is more options. So there’s a technology out there that’s developmental. It’s called MARS and may RS, which will be coming out hopefully in the next in the next couple of years. So the the other part of the new technology that we’re talking about, obviously all the electric, the hybrid and and and please do not keep forget about the airframe design. When you talk about voice, people forget they talk about, well, we can tweak a procedure or we can shift it over a little bit this way, or we can limit the number of hours. But we’re not always looking at the source of the noise. The source of the noise is the airplane design itself. The tube and wing design has a lot of noise points on it. And then when you have these PBM procedures that are at low altitudes, and they’re repetitive and they’re concentrated. This is where you get to be in a followable situation. So the blended wing body is something to keep in mind. That’s being that’s being developed and is great hope. You will never hear people talk about how quiet they are. They’re going to be talking about fuel burns. They’re going to be talking about less emissions. But please know that those aircraft are actually considered and called in some circles, the silent aircraft and in order for communities to get along and coexist with airports. In my opinion, that’s really the real long term solution. So we’re almost at time here. I know, Karen, you have your hand up. And then if you can just say the date of your next meeting again, just for the record here. You said February, when in February? And it’s February 12. And I seven o’clock New York Eastern time. And if I apologize if I’ve gone on a little bit too long, but I do get very enthused, especially after I made we met these great group of people. We hope that Seattle will continue to participate and share their experiences with us so we can all learn from each other. And perhaps come together as one collective voice and work on a couple of initiatives that we could have potentially more impact and make changes that our communities really need practical solutions.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
So I’m going to thank you. I’m going to go to Karen for the kind of last question and then if we can just get a short answer and we have to move on the agenda. But Karen, go ahead.
[Karen Veloria]
Thank you. I’m Karen Valoria and I live under the flight path of SeaTac Airport. So I was just, this has just been such a hopeful last few half an hour because one of the, one of our issues here is that the 65DNL that people measure by, it makes no sense for us who live under the flight path. And so we have felt so all alone, thinking that we’re the only things, we always hear that, oh, this is the FAA’s problem, you know, we have to go through the FAA, but if there’s another voice, if we have a strong voices about this, it would be, it’s just hopeful. Thank you. Karen, thank you. And everyone across the board recognizes that the 65DNL is not, does not make any sense whatsoever. You can come up with a 65DNL on an hourly, monthly, whatever report you want. And it could be, you can have it as one aircraft per hour, or you can have 60 aircraft per hour. And you still come up with a monthly or an hourly 65DNL. What people have not seriously considered enough is the duration and the volume. Having one or five aircraft over your home an hour is one thing. When you have 70, 60, 70, even more in an hour, that is a whole different world. Exactly. Exactly. It’s a cumulative. It’s the cumulative that affects us. And they don’t measure that. Thank you. Karen, to continue on the hopeful, the FAA has, is understanding that because they are have gone through a noise policy review, and everyone seems now to be on a better page of understanding that a 65DNL does not accurately depict the lived experience of being under an overflight community. Great. Thank you very much. So, we’re going to move forward. Jeff, I see your hand up. Is there something that you could put in the chat? We’re behind in our agenda. So, and we can make sure to connect after.
[Jeff Harbaugh]
Thank you. Thank you so much, Maria and Aaron for the information. I think you hear here is a lot of enthusiasm and conversation for Seattle to continue its participation in the work. So, thanks so much for making time. You’re welcome. Thank you. Thank you for inviting us, everyone. Thank you, Maria. I’m going to turn it over to another topic that we had discussed previously, and this is the instrument flight procedures, IFT process and gateway and overview. And we’ll turn it over to Joseph Burt from the FAA.
[Joseph Bert (FAA Team Manager)]
Thanks. Good evening. I’m glad to be here. Nice seeing most of you again. I’m going to quickly go through the IFP process. If you have a question in one of the areas, please just stop me and I’ll try to answer them as we go and I’ll try to make up a little bit of time. Next slide, please. So, today I’m just going to kind of go through the instrument flight procedure process overview, how to use the IFP gateway, some timelines, and then preliminary IFP review schedules. Next slide, please. So, here are the different categories. So, you have feasibility, validation, design, environmental, community engagement. You have flight inspection and then publication after that. Next slide, please. We’re going to run through each one of these. So, feasibility. So, this is basically, anyone can submit a gateway request at any point in time from anyone in the public, from the airport can submit one to air traffic to industry. Anybody can come in and submit a gateway request. The different steps that will go through is once it goes in, the flight procedures team will look at it and say, hey, is this something that we can do? In other words, if you put in a request where you want an aircraft to fly 50 miles around something or let’s say your area or your house, it’s probably not going to be deemed feasible because it’s just not feasible. So, that’s kind of what they’ll look at. Then they’ll look at, at that point, they’ll look at pushing it over and have the airport review it and make sure the airport doesn’t have any immediate concerns. If the airport has concerns, that would be the time for them to reach out to the regional administrator and say, hey, you know, we would like more information on this. When would you be able to provide that and start that conversation? And then once that happens, it’ll be technically feasible by the flight procedures team. They will look at it and say, yeah, this is something we can do. Yeah, we can probably make it, make it work under a current criteria and then they will move it forward from that point on. Next slide, please. So, this is validation. So, here’s one of the important steps here. So, once it makes it through that first step, it’ll go to validation. The big takeaway here is this is where it will become a priority. This is where they’ll prioritize and assign the project a chart date or publication date or implementation, implementation date. However, you choose to call that. Next slide, please. Design. So, this is where they will get together. It depends on what the changes of who that involves. But for the most part, it’ll involve, always involve air traffic. And it’ll always involve the flight procedures team. There are, if it’s a major change, it will also involve industry. And then it could potentially involve the airport as well. So, if industry is involved, usually the airport is invited as well to partake in the work group process when they’re designing and developing and all that. And that’s where we would come in and hopefully identify some of the noise sensitive areas, those type of things. Next slide. Community engagement environmental kind of expense speaks for itself. This is where we would do the environmental piece on it. If there was anything on the environmental side that required us to do outreach. This would be the time that would happen, whether it’s state historic preservation, tribal parks and services, whether we need to do a public workshop, those type of things based on the changes that are happening. This is where all that will be determined and made a decision on moving forward and when we’re going to do all those. Next slide, please. This one, again, is just the procedures done. It’s past environmental. We’ve done the community engagement that we need to do on that side. They will then go to the QC, the quality control process. What they’ll do is they’ll just relook at the procedure and make sure it meets current criteria, because sometimes these procedures take, you know, six, eight months to build them. By the time they get done, criteria might have changed slightly so they might have to make some tweaks to it based on the criteria change that may have happened. So they’ll do a quick QC quality control review. And then it’ll go to the next one. Next slide. Next slide is flight inspection. So I think it speaks for itself. This is where the aircraft goes out, flies the procedure and determines that it is safe for flight, right? The altitudes meet, the coverage, if they’re using a VOR, does it maintain the coverage of the VOR? Does it go into blind spots of the VOR? That’s where they make sure all this. They also look at the lighting, all that other stuff at the airport as well. And Joseph, you’re saying VR, can you just describe what that is just for folks that aren’t following you? It’s a ground-based nav aid that shoots out radial and distances. It’s VHF omnidirectional, basically navigation aid that’s on the ground, and it shoots 360-degree radial, and pilots can guide off of that system itself. Sorry. Next slide, please. And then publication. So this is when it will actually be published, implemented, charted, whatever term you’d like to use. And then from there, we would just be waiting for it to go in, and then we watch to see and make sure everything’s good and we’re not getting any complaints. Next slide, please. So that’s quick overview of the process. Any questions on that? I know I went through it quick, but I know we’re kind of rushed for time, so I’m just trying to get through. And we will send these slides, obviously, out with the presentation. I think just one of the key areas here, and we can talk about it as we go through this, is just understanding kind of who can make the request. How is it prioritized? Yeah, how is it prioritized and determined within the kind of broader guidelines of the FAA? So I think you’re starting to get there, and then, you know, if anybody else has any questions, please feel free to jump in, but we can also just keep moving. Yeah, so prioritized, I don’t know that I’ll get into it, so I’ll talk to that now. So prioritized is basically going to determine, is it safety related? Is it noise related, right? Where does it fit on the scale of the projects that we have going on, right? So if we have a bunch of safety, it may be bumped down below all the safety ones, so it really just depends on what the procedure is doing, right? Is it providing more safety? Is it providing safety and efficiency? Is it moving noise or moving aircraft to reduce noise? That’s probably going to be lower if we have a bunch of safety issues. So it really just depends on what the procedure, the end state of that procedure is. What is the goal of that procedure? Alright, now we’ll kind of go over the gateway. So hit real quick things that you should put in the gateway. If you’re requesting a new instrument flight procedure, that’s what IFP is. If you’re requesting to amend an existing or published IFP or instrument flight procedure, and if you’re requesting an existing procedure to be canceled. So sometimes we’ll get airports that say, hey, we’ve been monitoring our departures and we don’t get anybody on this departure anymore. Can we cancel this departure? So we would go and look at it and then cancel it if it is underutilized. So that is why canceled is on there. Next slide. And just a question in the chat here around, do you have an idea of how many requests are received each year through this portal and what is the approval rate? I do not have that answer because we have three service centers. They all have gateway access. Then you have Oklahoma that’s there, the headquarters or the overall folks. And so I honestly have no idea how many requests we would get in a year or the approval rate. Okay. All right, let’s keep going. Okay, so what you should submit by IFP gateway or into the gateway. So if it’s changes that can be done via air traffic or automation, that would not go in the gateway. If it’s changes that a pilot can do, whether it’s a rerouting of an aircraft or something like that, that would not go into the IFP gateway. If it’s changes to frequencies, airport lighting, airport diagrams, anything that’s really charted, that’s probably not going to go, that would not go in the gateway either. So it’s mainly just when you’re dealing with instrument flight procedures and things like that. Other things like, you know, comms or rerouting of aircraft that will be outside of the IFP gateway. Next slide, please. So to find the IP gateway, since most of you probably are not familiar, you can go to that link that’s up top there, or you can just simply go into Google and type in IFP gateway. And it’ll bring you up that web page right there that says instrument flight procedures information gateway. That is the easiest way to find it. Next slide. So when you click on it, you’ll get a disclaimer that says that mainly this is not for comments on environmental or anything like that. This is strictly for instrument flight procedures and inputs from the aviation community on flyability or issues like that that they may see in this process. So this is what the page will open up when you click that link. Some of the key things here before we go too far. You can see this one is for Los Angeles, but at that little box above that, there’s a little magnifying glass. You can type in SEA there and it’ll list all the procedures that are in the gateway for SEA. And then it’ll also show you what’s in the works and all of that stuff for Seattle. Next slide, please. But on the left where you saw the box in red on the left, that’s where you would click on the IFP request form. So when you click on that little, that little link there, that’ll bring you to the actual form that you would fill out and submit your gateway request into the system itself. Next slide. So again, we kind of talked about this already. This is for tracking. You’ll see the little tabs down at the bottom of that red box where it says charts, IFP, protection plan, no down lower. In the red box, there’s three or four tabs. Yeah, you’ll see charts so that lists all the procedures that are at the airport, what’s in production plan, what’s in coordination and then the documentation tab itself. If there’s anything going on, those tabs will have files in it. Next slide, please. Something that’s good about the portal that a lot of people don’t seem to know is you can actually sign up or register and it’ll notify you if anything pops onto the IFP gateway for whatever airport you put into. If you want Seattle pain bowling, you can put in one for each one of those. It’ll notify you whenever anything goes in the gateway and moves across. Here’s a better look at what I just talked about. You see where it says charts, IFP production plan, IFP coordination documents. That’s the tabs I was talking about on the previous page. As you can see there, nothing, once you submit your gateway request, it’s probably going to be two to four months before anything populates in that tab. So if you submit a gateway request, you’re probably not going to see that on the tab for about two to four months and then you probably will see something in their reference, whatever procedure you requested to have changed, amended or canceled. One thing to remember is if the chart date is assigned, if it makes it through and it gets a chart date, if that chart date happens to be three years from now, it’s not going to show on here either until it gets within two years of the chart date. So that’s another piece that you need to be aware of as well. Next slide, please. This is kind of what those tabs look like. So you’ll see pending under development at FlightCheck. So that’s at the QC stage or the FlightCheck stage, right? And then you’ll see a waiting publication. That usually means everything’s done. It’s just waiting to publish, right? Everything’s been checked out. We’re good. And then the one on the bottom means it’s been published and it’s all done. One thing that I want to note here is where you see pending under development at FlightCheck, you’ll also see a comments. I think it says public comments or something comments in there. Again, that is more for the aviators to make comments like, hey, we can’t make that altitude on that procedure. We need you to lower it at that waypoint. Or that degree of turn is too much for our aircraft. It goes against our regulations, whatever, right? So that’s the comments they’re looking for. They’re not looking for environmental concerns, noise concerns, anything like that. That is not what this comment period is for. Next slide, please. Again, just kind of reiterating the same thing I said. They’re not going to show when you’re in feasibility or validation. When it’s in design, it’ll normally go to pending. For community engagement, it’ll be pending. Then when it goes to development and QC quality control, it’ll go to under development in that tab that we just talked about. And then if it goes flight inspection, it’ll go flight inspection and then publication will be awaiting publication. So just kind of a different way of showing what we just talked about. Okay, next one will be timelines. So feasibility stage, roughly 45 days. Validation stage, roughly 45 days. Designs two to four months could take longer. Just depends on how many changes there are, how many, if there’s only one change. If we make that change, do we have to make changes to other procedures? Because sometimes if you move one, it’s kind of a snowball effect where you got to start moving other procedures because now you’re not separated from them. And then you have environmental, which usually takes two to four months. Again, sometimes takes longer if we have to do coordination with the state historic preservation, the tribal coordination or anything like that, national parks, state parks. Then when it gets to developmental and QC, that’s about two months flight inspection, they get roughly 50 days to do that. Sometimes there’s delays there depending on weather, right? And then it won’t apply here, but like in Alaska, they only have a certain window that they can do flight checks. So if you don’t make that window, then you got to wait like four or five months till they can get back up to Alaska to do these, right? Doesn’t necessarily apply here, but just know these aren’t hard and fast. They are somewhat flexible, maybe. And then publication usually about two months to publish and then we’re done with that. Next slide. Okay, so here’s kind of what that one question asked was, there’s currently more than 4000 requests in process at one time. That doesn’t mean that’s what we get a year. That’s what’s currently in there. And then right now we only can do about 260 per chart cycle. And then we have roughly six chart cycles a year. So roughly right now, our books say it’s about two, just over two and a half years to get something changed. I will tell you, under the current situation we’re in, that is a lot longer now. A lot, we’ve had a lot of staffing cuts due to, you know, all the stuff that’s going on. So a lot of areas are understaffed and so those timelines have slightly increased. We’re hoping to get that fixed. And we’re trying to work through ways to make that fixed, but just know, normally it’s too little over two and a half, but right now we’re probably running more like three to three and a half. Under with the current staffing issues that we have. Next slide please. Unless directly related to safety, you know, again, expect at least two years to process if it’s not safety related. And then here’s kind of where I talked about the priorities. So you have safety, you have airport and navigational infrastructure changes, national initiatives, and then other so any changes for noise, stuff like that would fall under the other category, unless we can somehow tie it to safety. Next slide. Okay. So preliminary views can be completed at the request of the regional administrators office. So what we’re talking about here is, if somebody has a let’s say start has a proposal. We come to the regional administrators office and say, hey, we have this proposal we would like for you to look at it and give us an idea if this is something that the FAA can do. And you can simply do that by submitting all the information to the regional administrator and then they will forward it on to our office in the operation support group. And we will, we will fit that in somehow and look at it and then get back. This is not something we do on a routine basis. This is on a limited basis. That’s why we’d like to, to have the roundtables involved and kind of prioritize things. We did have one roundtable who had, I want to say was five different thoughts or recommendations that they wanted us to look at and we ended up having to go back and say, we don’t have the manpower to do this. So what we ask is you prioritize from the roundtable viewpoint on what is most important and then we’ll go down the list and get to them as we can. So just know that with limited resources, it may take a while for us to get to it. And that’s the next bullet as well. So next slide please. I know I went through it fast. I know it’s a lot of material. But like I said, you’ll have the slides if you have questions, you can surely submit them to the roundtable or the port and they’ll forward them on and we can get you some answers in writing or maybe set up another roundtable down the road to talk. Roger, go ahead.
[Roger Kaden (SeaTac)]
Roger, you’re on mute. While you get off mute here, I did, I think that last point and, you know, I think maybe others have won away in on this is, although this portal is open to everybody, what I just heard you say at the end there was, you know, as a roundtable comes forward with requests, that is kind of a more streamlined way of doing this. So although it’s available to everybody, there’s a process in place that could work better through kind of collaboration amongst the roundtable. Yeah, okay. Just confirming that. Okay, perfect. Okay, Roger, go ahead. Maybe helpful if you could give perhaps a couple of very specific examples of the types of requests you’ve been seeing. Sure. So we had a request from the San Francisco roundtable to utilize a departure that does not go over basically the city of San Francisco. It goes out over the bay, comes out over the Golden Gate Bridge, goes out over the ocean, and then turns and crosses over when they’re like 1416,000 feet, they cross back over land. So we got together with their traffic, we got together with Oakland Airport because in order to do that, Oakland would have to fly a certain departure as well, because the streams mix. So we were able to get together, and we were able to come to an agreement that, hey, we can do this. They originally wanted from 10pm to 5am, no, I’m sorry, 7am. And we went back and said, look, we can’t do that, because traffic’s still too busy, but we can start out and go from one to five. And then we will continue to evaluate and look at expanding the hour slowly as we move through. Another real quick example is out of San Diego, the Zoo Departure. The folks that were on the coastline didn’t like the aircraft turning back over the coast so low or so quickly. So they asked us, can we go any further out over the ocean before they turn back? We went to air traffic, we went to industry, we went to the FPT folks, and we designed and pushed that procedure roughly two miles further out. I think it was about 1.6 or 1.8 miles out further before they make their turn back. So they were happy with that as well. So we have a couple of LAX that we did where they were turning a little bit early. We made them turn a little farther out over the water. So we have many examples of this, and these all came through the round table, working with the round table, sitting down, having those conversations. Hey, what are you trying to accomplish, right? Because that’s the big piece that we don’t always get in the gateway. What are you trying to accomplish? And then once we know that, then we can kind of help, right? Like, hey, we might, if we can tweak this, are you okay if it goes here? Are you okay if it doesn’t? And so that’s why I think those have been successful. Eric, I see you came off mute for a second. Do you want to say anything here?
[Eric Schinfeld (Port Federal Policy Director)]
Well, I mean, I think, obviously, at the airport and at the port, we get a lot of people contacting us and saying, I don’t like this plane flying over my head, right? Or I don’t like this flight path rather coming over my house. And traditionally in the past, we’ve said, I’m so sorry, that’s an FAA issue, we don’t control flight paths. And so we were very excited to bring this topic to start because really finding out that there is actually a process in place to deal with these, that people, whether they’re individuals or cities or groups or even a round table like ours, have a process to actually address these. Now, I do think that there is this fundamental question for us as the airport authority, because as Joe mentioned very briefly, hopefully all of you all caught it. Anytime anybody submits a request, the FAA does ask the airport for its input onto whether or not the FAA should proceed with this analysis. And I will tell you, as the airport authority, we have no expertise in understanding flight paths. We don’t do that. We’ve always said it’s the realm of the FAA. And so, you know, one of the things would be great to get feedback from y’all on is, you know, there could be, to sort of Morris point earlier, there could be two a year, there could be 50 a year, right? Every individual in this entire Seattle area region could say, I want to move this flight path this way or not. So, we as the airport need to develop some kind of criteria or process or internal policy to say, what do we do when the FAA comes to us and says someone’s put something in the portal? You know, what’s your feedback on that? Because we don’t have that right now. And until we do, it’s going to be very hard for us to respond one way or the other. So I wanted to put that out there as well. But in general, I think obviously for anybody who has an idea for a flight path change or a flight procedure change to now know that this exists and something that can be taken advantage of, I do think it’s a really positive thing. Yeah, Jess, and then I’ll just add the broader question around what role should start play in addition to that. Yeah, Jess, go ahead. I’m just curious as to whether the geography of SeaTac Airport and its location where it’s located offers much flexibility with regards to flight paths that would be an improvement over what we have now. That may be, Joe, a little more of a complex question as I can expect you to answer right now, but it’s certainly something we’re all aware of that is the geographic constraints of the airport. Thank you. Jeff, I would say I agree with you. It is not my expertise. But I know we have conversations about this all the time. But I would say don’t let that hinder you. If you have a request that you think works, then do it. Let us look at it and see you never know it might it might actually work. So what I always say is don’t let us say no. Don’t just think we’re just don’t say no, I’m not doing it. Let us say no, you know, and then you get your answer. But yes, that is a concern in this area is the geography. Thank you, Joe. And I’ll just add really quickly, you know, I think that is very true close to the airport. It is not as true further out in the region. And so, you know, there may be folks not in the near or poor communities that might have some of those opportunities that near or poor communities might not. I think I just heard the people on the shun jumping up and down. So just to this question around kind of starts role in considering this, these flight paths. I mean, in some sort of like group recommendation to move forward. Just curious if folks, how do. How do folks think about that within the construct of how we’ve kind of designed start here. Is that something that people have energy to pursue? Yeah, Roger. I think your biggest issue is what Eric already brought up that none of us that I’m aware of have any real expertise in the area of flight path design. It sounds like there’s the need for an external consultant or expert to come in and maybe give us some options before we go off. Again, I can hear like you say can hear fashion shouting, but that might be to the detriment of Des Moines for all we know. And again, that’s just a thought that here maybe there’s a position that’s needed at the airport in consultation with start or but it sounds like we definitely need some to pursue this. We need some rather than just random request some expertise that would help to to guide us. Thanks, Roger. So some additional external expertise in the form of a consultant to do that work. Yeah, Joe. Do you think there’s just a question for the airport staff, the staffers here. Is there enough expertise on the staff and certainly the industry out there. Our local airlines and then maybe even some participation by the FAA were at the roundtable level, we could at least prioritize and and maybe get it to the point where we say, okay, we have five requests, maybe but these two look like they’re the most promising and move ahead with those. Just, just asking, do we have that kind of expertise without dragging in the outside consultants. Anyone from the poor Eric you want to, if you’ve mentioned that that expertise maybe doesn’t exist at the airport, but anything you want to add there anybody else from the airport. If I could just say, oh yeah, Tom good from the point of view of analysis, we would, we would need the help of a consultant to look at what the effects of a change would be who would be getting new noise who would benefit from it. How many people would benefit from it how many people would end up maybe worse off for the change. So that’s where we would really need the benefit of a consultant on board. I can just say and that would be that would play in heavily into whether we would want to proceed with a change. And I’ll just say, you know, to build on what Tom said, you know, you know what I think is important whether it’s just us as the airport staff thinking this through or whether we have, you know, there’s some role for start to give us advice and counsel and prioritize things. You know, Tom sort of started to throw out what some of those criteria might be right. How many people does it help, does it hurt, you know, not hurt but you know, does it shift noise over more people than it takes noise away from, you know, so I think there’s some criteria there that can be eased out that can make some of that thinking through, you know, even before there’s a consultant on board, you know, at least some sort of just back of the envelope conventional wisdom types of things. You know, if there is something where in some flight path, you know, it can be moved over water, for example, you know that, you know, that is a criteria you could look at as maybe that’s a priority or not depending on how many people it helps so the technical expertise and analysis importance, but I think the policy at the higher level, including the criteria is important as well.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
So I see Jeff, your hand, I do want to and then maybe Jeff, you’ll be the kind of last one that we go to just to move forward, but I do encourage kind of the broader city representatives to, you know, think about this. And we can bring some additional feedback back around this topic at a later date. I think this is one where everybody we want to definitely hear from everybody, all the city representation here as well so Jeff go ahead. Yeah, I was just thinking that if we were to undertake such an effort, it probably auto include the impact of the projected growth over the next five to eight years, because I can’t avoid thinking that would have an impact on flight path. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. I’m going to go ahead and move us along, but thank you, Joseph for that presentation. As Marco put in the chat, all the start slides are posted on the website, but we will go ahead and fix some of the formatting issues that were out there and go ahead and put it forward. So thanks. Thanks, Joseph. Appreciate the time. Yeah. Next on our agenda is a conversation around updates around kind of where we are in the 2025 2026 priority framework. So let me go ahead and get the PowerPoint back up. Okay, I think folks can see that okay. And then it just stopped sharing and I’m going to share it again. Okay, so. Yeah, so as folks remember we did a an initial pass at getting much more specific around what we are covering both at this meeting, which I’m going to call the big start meeting. What we are covering both at the work working group meetings and to really reflect kind of this 2025 2026 priority agenda that we put forward. Part of that was a conversation around kind of the state legislative agenda, the federal legislative agenda. But a lot of that was how do we want to better use our time here. And so we’ve started to do some of this work at the committee level. And I’ll just reflect that our strategy priority around reducing noise impacts was was one of was the first one that we talked about. And particularly when we talked about shared action we we wanted to really frame that in a way where given that we operate in a consensus 100% consensus model what is the shared action that can actually take a step forward in in 2025 and 2026. And for that, we started talking about sound insulation and trying to better understand and prioritize expansion of sound insulation packages, the pilot programs feature options as the most direct and effective noise reduction strategy. So we started to do that gradually within the within the noise group, I think, and I would venture that we can do that, even more so, as we’ve kind of continued to do our work into 2026. The part of that was to start to differentiate. I think there was a lot of kind of merging of definitions in terms in terms of when we were talking about sound insulation and really try to differentiate when we’re talking about a kind of pilot program, a replacement of sound insulation packages, you know, and be able to kind of then think about strategies of how to address each of them so that’s happening at the at the working group level through the noise right now. We are also looking at our environmental justice or air quality strategic priority where one of the requests that was happening was to to create a central resource for air quality data solutions and progress updates. I haven’t brought that forward that’s to to the group yet, but that is an example of something that can be prioritized in 2026 for discussion, either through the working group and then into big start, where we’re really kind of centralizing data metrics reports out and there’s been other reports that the port and others have done around this issue around not just air quality but broader issues that we want to try to centralize so that folks can see them more readily. And then finally, airport growth and capacity, which is a big topic. This year, we had quite a bit of conversation around this, and this this conversation around capacity and impact to understand how Sam, the FA capacity data and other airport master plans kind of fit together in this broader conversation around what the region is going to be and what does it mean for airports. So, the question here for you all, and I’m going to stop sharing this in a second is that we need to understand kind of from the group where do we want to start in 2026 to put disproportionate attention into these agenda items that we can continue to drive towards this framework and be able to kind of start to address these shared action priorities. So, let me just pause there and see if, if folks have questions or thoughts and what that would mean is that we would prioritize additional briefings either in the working group, or in this group for these conversations so Barton and then Catherine. Yeah, hi. My understanding with the stamp process is that their findings of no impact regarding health. We know we have noise issues. What about the health issues, and by finding there’s no impact that they were using very dated data, and it really merits a more, even if there aren’t solutions yet seems to me a more thorough analysis of what the health impacts are. And this would lead into the part 150 aspect where we can, we can, besides noise packages, we’ve got land use issues. And as we look forward in the 2026, at least in the city of Des Moines. We’re maybe we would rezoning and maybe even relocation of adversely affected residents, perhaps be one of the mitigation factors we could pursue. But a lot of this goes back to understanding better the health issues, which it seems like seemed kind of pushed inside. So these are, I think you’re bringing up a couple of points and I want to kind of try to frame them within these priorities that we’ve just articulated. There is a portion around data that you are asking about kind of updated data that would go in that maybe centralized information hub to help help kind of inform and stamp is a part of that but there’s other maybe data that we can use. There is a growth land use conversation around airport growth and capacity that is also part of that that is in that third data that should be part of how we talk about airport growth and capacity. And then, and I think those are the kind of main points that I heard from you as kind of prioritizing those issues within those conversations is that right. Yes. Okay, great. Thank you. Catherine. I think as, as I sort of understood your question, Andre, it was really about of these priorities, what do we focus on even more with amongst them. And so I would say I think in light of the SAM really it’s that last one that we should spend the bulk of time on. So, you know, within that last one about airport growth there’s like a request for more data of sort of like, and I don’t, I mean I agree with Barton’s comment on health data, but what I’m really looking for is like data on where are these extra flights going, how are they going to be supported, what does that mean for frequency, which I think hasn’t, or at least I’ve not really heard. So, I am most interested in getting a lot better detail on what for as a lived experience, does this expansion really mean for these communities. And really I would say like, I’m not really interested in pursuing the other priorities right now because this really is front and center for so many of the communities. So, that that capacity and impact that real detailed information is what, for at least to moin my perspective I would say is our priority. Catherine and what that means also as we kind of shift priorities to something like this it means that we would need to figure out. How do we are there other avenues where we’re sharing information that folks are regularly getting other than this meeting, right. And I think there’s some really important workgroup updates etc that that folks need to hear and if we’re prioritizing more detailed conversations around that means we’re, we’re limiting the ability to actually bring some additional conversation on these other things that we’re used to. So just saying that. Thanks Catherine. Other other thoughts around this. Okay, so I’m hearing that this. Well, this last one is really important like I got some good reaction and head nods are around that and a thumbs up. Yeah, Jeff go ahead. So, I guess the action item here might be for the steering committee to agree to have a presentation from the port on their projected impact of their growth, which they must have done some work on. So, so, given the rules we operate under right now that suggestion would have to come from the steering committee and I hope the people who are the members there might consider bringing that forward. Thank you. Thanks, Jeff. Roger. Yes, I absolutely agree with Jeff on that point. Again, my, my human cry has been for a long time the capacity issues and I think that’s just it’s integral to the whole whole discussion of of noise and air quality or environmental impacts as well. Because we just need to know, and I don’t think we have all the information in front of us of really what is implied by the SAM construction in terms of what we’re going to see in terms of aircraft. We’re going to we’re talking about 19 gates. That’s an awful lot of airports. And so where they go is going to be an important factor and we just as general public don’t really have a feel for that yet. Yeah. Okay, so I’m getting in. I think Jeff to your point. Yeah, the purpose of kind of this conversations to bring this question to for everybody’s attention, but also we’re going to bring this feedback to the steering committee to your point to make an And Roger hearing hearing a plus one on on this third one here with some additional data. And also noting that, although yes the stamp is on there. There’s other things that are that are happening around airport capacity in the region like the cog, some of the other regional master plans that are also we’re going to have to figure out how to bring that information into inform this conversation as well so any other points here. I want to make sure folks have opportunity to jump in you could also write in the chat or also email us separately, but we really are intention here is to really start to give priority to this priority framework so that we can show progress. I think Jeff yeah go ahead. Yeah, I’m sorry it’s me again. With regards to the health data. I mean, Barton and Roger are right. We’d love to have more data more data would be good. The port has reminded us some time ago in this meeting that correlation to just not equal causation, and we don’t have double blind studies on health impact so we can’t do anything about it. I guess I would suggest that the quantity of data that we’ve seen in the last five day years makes it a near certainty that our health impacts that there are health impacts. And, and I hope we can begin to come together on that idea and need for some mitigation. I don’t like that word anymore but need for some help for people in certain areas that are most likely impacted by the health issues, even if we don’t have a double blind study. Thank you. Thanks Jeff. I think the other point here is that second shooting priority where we’re building that information hub around additional data bring it all together. That work I think still needs to continue and still will continue but in terms of how we’re prioritizing the meeting time for the big start in some of these spaces, it I’m hearing that the third, the third priorities of most interest so. Okay, well we will bring that feedback back to the steering committee and if other people have additional points please email Cheryl and myself and we’ll make sure to get that into the steering committee discussion and the agenda. I appreciate everybody’s consideration of that. I am now going to turn it back over to Eric and john that are going to report back on the policy working group meeting. And I will share my screen again go ahead Eric. Well, I’ll mostly turn things over to john the majority of the policy working group was about the state legislative agenda and potential changes to it with john report back on. I did want to say that today, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which is a annual defense authorization bill and significant to us here because it has now been passed by the House and the Senate. And the Senate in that National Defense Authorization Act is the legislation led by Representative Smith and Senator Murray, that will allow for federal funding for secondary noise insulation repair and replacement. This is something that start has prioritized as part of its DC legislative agenda for the past several years, something that we’ve partnered with our members of Congress representative Smith and Senator Murray like I said, but also Senator Cantwell and representative who have done just great work and is now officially passed by Congress will be signed into law in the next few days by the president. And then we’ll be working very closely all of us with the FA to make sure that gets implemented. And we’ll be something that the noise working group can then talk about how that works with the existing repair replacement program what changes that might lead to etc so good news for us another piece of legislation passed by Congress as part of the start legislative agenda and we’re really pleased with that Jeff. I understand as I read it that there were some caveats to that legislation. I gather that will eliminate any houses that older than 2002. I also think the 65 decibel level still applies. Am I based on that. It does apply to homes within the 65 dnl. It adds homes pre 2002 so right now under federal law only homes that were insulated pre 1993 are eligible for federal sound insulation repair and replacement. This legislation expands that so that any home insulated pre 2002 that meets the criteria is now eligible for federal funding for repair and replacement. Okay so I had it a little backwards because it’s the ones after 2002 that aren’t eligible. That those are still not eligible but those are obviously that’s a big number I think I think it’s what two thirds or something or two thirds since 2002. I don’t know that number but I obviously the ones pre 2002 are the oldest ones which would be the ones where you would start to see the most age on those packages. Well so I guess we’re still a ways from getting anybody’s packages fixed and yes you can look to me to continue to nag you about it. Thank you. Jeff, we’ll turn to john for the state update. Sure. Good evening folks. I’ll share my screen here really quick as well just to make sure folks are looking at this language with me. So as Eric kind of alluded to there, we spent I think most or at least the most significant portion of the policy working group this past time, looking at the shared state agenda. The number one priority that came out of that conversation was the language you see here in red. And the directive was for us to paint some sort of a distinction within the shared agenda, noting that Senate bill 5652 which is Senator Orwell’s bill that was introduced last session, knowing that it’s going to be major point of conversation during session and probably I think Jeff may have even said it’ll be the most significant legislation to do with the airport for the foreseeable future, and maybe misattributing that quote but I think Jeff’s looking at me like it wasn’t him. There’s somebody else. Anyways, noting that there continues to be disagreement between the port and the airport communities about a shared approach on the bill just pointing it out. I’d really like to take credit jobs. Sure, I’ll give it to you then. So, if folks have additional thoughts or edits or anything like that in this language, my proposal would be to share it this evening via Andreas and have him send it out to folks for any proposed edits or anything like that that we could then address at the next policy working group. Any edits or suggestions coming in from folks then I think we’re near final on this or maybe even final because that was the major thing reminder for folks to we’ve discussed a study proviso of some sort for this coming session. Looking at an update to understand impacts associated with Sam, setting aside some money in the state’s budget to do that work. We still don’t have provides a language I am going to put, I think, I don’t think Anthony Hempstead is technically on this portion of the call but I know he’s probably listening in somewhere. He had volunteered to start drafting some language so that we could start working on something for this session. Haven’t seen any language there yet, but as soon as we have anything I’ll be happy to report back on it. Maybe I’ll start there noting that. Catherine good. Yeah, quick question, John, can you talk more about that study because I’ve heard a lot of it’ll be just like this one or it’ll be different. Can you give a little bit more detail on what the port is intending to support. I really don’t know if I can only because we’ve, I think talked at a very high level about what could be in the study and my main ask for the group was, what are we trying to capture that wasn’t already covered in any of the environmental analysis that either has happened or is ongoing here. I’ve heard some ideas from folks about exactly what they would want captured, but because we haven’t had a draft proviso to kind of build off of and to send around and share to folks. I don’t feel like I have a good idea of what all belongs in there either. So, I guess, following this evening’s conversation, I will plan to follow up with Anthony again and again, get volunteered to kind of draft that initial language. And then from there, send that around to folks by the consulting team on this and make sure that we’re capturing exactly all what would kind of belong in there. And I mean, as of right now, that is not reflected in the shared agenda that we have, but if necessary, we could amend this document later on or mid session as we approach our lobby day, which another kind of convenient segue and reminder for folks were headed down to Olympia as a group on I believe February 3. Yeah, and we’ll, we’ll send out more details after the new year on that I did want to just call out something that you just said johns and sorry Catherine if you had to follow up let me let me just say real quick and we’ll go back to you. One of the things that we ran into last year in our first year of the state legislative agenda is that we sort of approved it and then we went into session and sort of, you know, treated it as a set document. I want to just call out what john said, which is that what is approved now is what we know sort of going into session, but everybody who does state legislative work knows that new bills get introduced things change. And so we are going to treat this much more as a living document this legislative session and be in dialogue with start to figure out how it will change and evolve and add and subtract during session so that’s really important point I just wanted to, to call that out so thanks for saying that john Catherine back to you. Thanks Eric. Just on your point john and I mean, I’m with Des Moines so technically Anthony is on this call, and Anthony works for Des Moines, I guess I can call you tomorrow and say this. So I think what’ll be really pertinent to me in that draft language is who is going to oversee this study right so is it some totally neutral third party is the port overseeing this study or the cities so I think that’ll be like a really important detail that can really dictate whether or not the cities are like fully behind it or not. So for what that’s worth. Thanks. And I will say, I do think that is one thing we have kind of covered as a group I think there has been near unanimous or unanimous agreement that some sort of third party adjudicator whoever that is a trusted party to carry forward the analysis on behalf of all of us here. Okay, thanks. So the single ad here is given some of these, this new language and changes and the proviso language, and then the language and read that john mentioned we have added another out of calendar, we’re out of sync meeting of the policy group that’s going to happen. It’s January 5. And so that is giving us time before the February visit to kind of finalize some of these pieces and be able to kind of take the next step before the Olympia vivid. So just saying that out loud. Any other questions for john and Eric.
[Tom Fagerström (Port of Seattle)]
Thank you both. I will turn it over to Tom to give us an update on the noise working group. Hey, thanks Andres. Yes, the aviation noise working group met on December 8 and covered a few of our ongoing initiatives before transitioning then in the same meeting to the part 150 TRC meeting. So the noise working group portion of the meeting began with myself giving a brief a look at late night noise limitation program updates since the fourth quarter is not done yet I did not have a full quarter analysis. So I talked a bit about November late night operations again this is between midnight and five averaging 37 operations per night in November 30 of those passenger operations, seven of those cargo. And I included some data pertaining to the number of newer aircraft operating during our late night hours versus the older models we continue to push carriers to retire those older model aircrafts that’s something we track. I discussed our intention to meet with FedEx and discuss their MD 11 aircraft operations which are allowed aircraft at night. And that meeting was postponed due to the grounding nationwide of the MD 11 aircraft. So we instead pivoted to Air Transport International to meet with them to talk about their late night noise they operate on behalf of Amazon Prime about their late night noise however, being the busiest month, busiest period of the year we may not be able to accomplish that meeting in December, but we will get together with with them. Then we talked about a third runway usage during late night hours and we’re averaging just a little over four landings per late night in 2025. In 2024 we averaged 4.8 landings on the third runway between midnight and five we’ve got a voluntary agreement to limit those landings during those hours. In other words, then brief the group on aircraft go around statistics for October and November averaging 3.1 and 3.0 aircraft go arounds per day. In those months, poor weather being the biggest single reason for these occurrences. And I would just like to take off hand that that has definitely continued in December with our challenging weather that we’ve had. We’ve had a number of go arounds because of the winds and heavy rains for noise comments and complaint Inform the group that there were a total of 7,794 complaints to the airport in October from 173 distinct households, which is about half as many as there were in October of 2024. Then noise program senior manager Ryan McMullen then gave a brief update on sound insulation projects currently underway in 2025. The sound installation has been completed on one single family home and also 200 apartment units from three different apartment complexes. And also construction has begun at two places of worship late this year as well. For the sound insulation repair and replacement pilot program design walks were conducted at three single family homes recently and outreach continues to potentially eligible homes to see who is interested in acoustic testing for this program. And then Ryan covered the National Defense Authorization Act that was covered previously by Eric and the update on the pre 2002. Insulation then Marco and the Port of Seattle safety manager assistant director David crowner. Then gave an update to our previous initiative that encouraged the use of single engine taxing for aircraft at SCA. This language had been published into our airports master record last year. But had resulted in a pair of incidents of jet blast at our airport. In the gate areas at SCA these incidents led to a necessary update to this language we were informing the group. The new language encouraged the use of minimum necessary thrust rather than single engine thrust when taxing around terminal and aircraft parking areas. In order to minimize noise and jet blast and this new updated language will be into the airport master record in early 2026. At this point the working group meeting transitioned over to the third part 150 technical review committee meeting of 2025. And after a roll call of TRC members autumn ward of ESA the consultant that’s assisting with the part 150 at our airport. Let off the discussion by summarizing the four public workshops conducted earlier this year with a total of 85 attendees at the workshops and over 30 comments received to date. The primary concerns expressed were increased operations nighttime operations noise mitigation sound insulation programs and shifting ops to possibly to other airports in the region. And also, as we mentioned earlier tonight, a lot of concerns about the DNL noise metric. Then a in the presentation we had a review of the various outreach efforts that were summarized including land use meetings with a total of five different jurisdictions. Numerous tabling activities at local events throughout the year that talked about part 150. And we also had direct part 150 outreach to many local community based organizations also throughout the years those were all summarized at the meeting. And then what follows next was a discussion about the noise compatibility program phase of the study. This is where specific measures to limit noise exposure are considered and analyzed for inclusion in the final part 150 document. And this phase of the part 150 is just beginning. So we have some review of some past examples of measures that have been included in previous part 150s. The discussion was opened up to the group for dialogue and suggestions. So I’ll kind of summarize some of the suggestions we heard during that during that discussion for for noise abatement suggestions and noise abatement again is limiting the, the noise from the source of the of the noise, limiting the noise of the aircraft themselves. So we included encouraging the use of quieter aircraft by giving them preferential flight paths or preferential runways as as perhaps a way to encourage newer aircraft. Also, noise barriers were discussed in strategic areas around the airport as a possible mitigation measure also raise raising the glides still for arriving aircraft is another example of things that we discussed at our meeting. The suggestions for noise mitigation and sound installations were providing assistance to those wanting to move away from the 65 dnl area, and also assisting with rezoning areas that are impacted is assisting cities with rezoning efforts for those impacted by the noise, similar to what Barton has mentioned in the in our meeting. And some programmatic suggestions that these are programs that we as a noise office we as an airport conduct that was suggested to provide better and more direct information to the public about items that affect noise such as runway closures. And that can be perhaps through a dashboard directly on our, our website to give people that direct information about about things that that affect noise. Expand the fly quiet program to new categories and new hours, perhaps adding additional noise monitors was brought up as a possible programmatic suggestion that could be put into a part 150 final document. The TRC then wrapped up by updating the part 150 schedule. The draft noise exposure maps report release will be in early 2026. The screening and analysis of draft noise compatibility program measures will conduct in earnest during the spring and summer of 2026. And then another round of public workshops will happen in the fall of 2026 where we’ll talk about these measures that are being advanced forward. And, and again getting more public input on those, and we still do intend to have a final draft report of our part 150 in 2027. And that concluded our noise working group and TRC meeting. Thank you, Tom. Any quick questions for, for Tom, okay, Marco. Okay, if I just jump in real quick address Tom just just to clear something up we there’s been some email sent around I just want to present some some falling information on this. We did a draft letter commending China Airlines cargo for making a change to a quieter newer aircraft and we had sent a draft around to the start membership. And we got some feedback made some changes and sent us a second version of that letter on out. I just want to confirm everyone present that we have not sent that letter out to China Airlines cargo as of yet and we wouldn’t do that until we got 100% buy in from the start membership so that draft is still out there if anyone has any thoughts or feedback. Please share with us but just again to reiterate, nothing has been sent in regards to that letter. Yeah, I know for God.
[Katherine Caffrey]
Thank you, Andres. Marco, just a question about how feedback for approval is is being requested. As far as bearing is concerned we’ve said that we do not agree to the letter twice, but the process still continues so I’m just curious as to what the port interpretation is of receiving feedback to continue to move forward with the process or end the process. I do want to give other communities the chance to weigh in in case they could sway other steering committee members think differently so we’ve only heard back from one city so there are five other cities who are part of that steering committee. So if there is any different input they want to provide I just want to honor what they might want to say as well to before anything happens but yes if one city were to say no and we got 100% confirmation on that we would not send that letter out. Great. Thank you, Catherine. I think Adolfo shared with all of us on the city front sort of some of his concerns and so I think for Des Moines we’re going to support Birian that really, although I would like to, you know, express appreciation to airlines that voluntarily agree to things. I think it can send sort of a misleading message considering we’re at a point right now where I think everybody’s interest don’t align so Des Moines is going to support Birian and not sending that letter, or at least not being included at least. And thank you and just to be kind of just to crystallize the process we have in place is that it, you know, folks, one of the steering committee members say we are not in support of them that that letter does not go forward. And so at this point we’re at that point where it’s we first from two cities now and so that should end the letter going to any sort of additional edits. And so that’s where we’re at. I just want to be clear on that. Okay. Okay.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
Okay, I want to turn it over to our last presenter before we go to public comment, which is Sarah to talk about Sam.
[Sarah Cox (Port of Seattle)]
Hi, good evening, everyone. I, we will be a short update tonight. I think everyone is aware as of November 25, the 60 day NEPA appeal period closed. And we are continuing to move forward with our SIPA process we anticipate we’re still on schedule to release the draft SIPA at the end of quarter one of 2026. And then issue a final determination in Q4 of 2026 as well. We will continue as we get closer to that Q1 date to keep you up to speed on refinements of that date. And we’re still working through through the document development and analysis right now. Any questions for Sarah before we go to public comment.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
Okay. I will, I will do another call for questions after public comment, but I will go ahead and open public comment we have two commenters and I’ll ask Cheryl to start to bring them over the first is Ursula Euler. Again, this is limited to two minutes. Cheryl is going to.
[David Goebel (Public Commenter – Vashon)]
It’s actually David. Sorry. Oh, sorry, David. David. Okay. Thank you. David Goble is going to go first. And please unmute and turn on your video and you will have two minutes, two minutes to provide public comment. Can you, can you hear me? We can hear you.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
Okay.
[David Goebel (Public Commenter – Vashon)]
David Goble, a president of Vashon on first guys, very quickly, Sarah, didn’t mention that both the four cities and Vashon on first guys independently filed an appeal on the on the stamp of Fonsi rod for the EA. And so that’s basically soon the FAA. So anyway, that that is something an important point there. And on, I wonder, Joe mentioned the IP gateway has a way to sign up that actually is really useful. I signed up in 2018 and I carefully looked through all those changes. You have to understand that some of them you get, you get a notification for each step as it goes in the process. So it’s really important to go and read all of those. And it’s very variable. I just checked during the meeting and in 2024, I got 34 notifications, but I only got two in 2025. So that’s, I would recommend people do that. And oh, by the way, I’m going to submit a comment to the stamp tonight, including our, our petition, our petition for review of the, of the, of the EA funds. You’re right. I encourage everyone to go and you’ll get it all in your inboxes. It’ll be part of the official record for the tonight’s sent me tonight’s start meeting. And so I will include that. It’s a really good summary of kind of the cliff notes of what, of what our, our issues are. And I would really recommend people read it. It’s not very long and it will be very illuminative. And it will go to a lot of the things that Maria was talking about how the Seattle Seattle start kind of explicitly excludes communities that aren’t right by the airport. So that what next gen PBNs have done, if you could just imagine that the sea tech never existed. You live on a remote rural island and all of a sudden, approximately half of the traffic of sea tech goes over in 100 yard wide track. So a space in the airport opened this half the size of sea tech overnight. And then, but it’s considered not a significant impact and you’re excluded from all the, from all the, all the meeting, all the groups that exist to try to deal with environmental issues at the airport. It’s, it’s insane. It drives people absolutely sane because your life has been turned upside down and everything you’ve known for decades and generations living on the island is shattered and it’s gone. And no one thinks that it. But please read the petition for review. Thank you.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
Thank you, David. Time is up. Next in public comment is Ursula. And so as Ursula transitions, she will also have two minutes. And so Cheryl, go ahead and initiate that. And I don’t see her yet. There we go. Transition. There you go. It just takes a little while. Yeah, go ahead.
[Ursula Euler (Public Commenter – Thurston County)]
Yes, good evening. My name is Ursula Euler and I’m a long time resident of Thurston County, in which I have been actively involved over the last three or four years, including observing and part or commenting to the pack, which was the predecessor of the cog. I continue to watch the cog I also attend this meeting. I feel that Ms. I’m not questioning that they are not doing a good job with that. What I’m questioning is whether future growth should be based on past growth. I think a really close look on why who is flying for what reasons where they come from and where they’re going would be a really good survey to take. But through an independent organization, independent from the FAA and independent from CTAC, independent from airlines, a suggestion I could make and please feel free anyone of you members from cities on this round table, ask for my contact information. I give permission to give that out, but feel free to contact me, for example, for a contact name and other contact information, for example, for the International Council on Clean Transportation. They are an independent nonprofit organization. They have an office in San Francisco, and they do have developed long developed aviation expertise. So there are groups out there who could conduct an independent survey and hopefully a survey that includes health and environmental impacts and does not tout all these promises about SAFs and other clean flying. Thank you. Sorry, I went over time. Appreciate your comment. Thank you so much.
[Andres Mantilla (Facilitator)]
Okay. We are done with our meeting. Thank you for keeping pace. There’s a lot of information there and hopefully you found it all helpful and informative. There’s some very clear follow ups that we have here as well and some clear direction for the steering committee, but also for this group. Our next meeting is scheduled in February of 2026. We don’t yet have an exact date for that meeting. Marco, I’m looking at you here and Cheryl. So in the notes, it will say February 2026, but we will very quickly confirm a date for February to get on everybody’s calendar. So we’ll share all soon to get the whole 2026 series of dates on everyone’s calendars as soon as possible. Okay. With that, just ask any, any final questions or thoughts, comments. Yeah, Joe.
[Joe Dusenberry]
Maria mentioned a meeting round table of round tables on February 12. Who’s going to attend that meeting. And what’s the format? Is that that in person or is it zoom or the us Maria to answer the latter part of that question in terms of the format and then we can talk about who who attends.
[Andres Mantilla]
Joe, the meetings are held virtually by zoom. At the moment, they are restricted to the chairpersons or the executive directors of each of the round tables in the list of attendees may be expanded. But right now it is open to the, the managers of the of the various round tables, who we expect will share that information with the members of their round tables. Thank you. So I saw some good interest from folks to have start participation there and so perhaps this is something that we can bring back to the steering committee for our operational procedures and make a designation of who, who’s interested in attending. Great. All right, all Barton, go ahead. Barton, you are, we can’t hear you. You’re off mute. So I think you’re having some microphone issue. If, if you’d like to put it in the chat, we can, I can read it out. Folks can’t hear Barton, right? It’s not just me. Okay, great. Roger, we’ll go to Roger. We’ll see Barton, you can figure out your sound.
[Roger Kaden]
We can read each of the question, who is our manager. Right. You find that that sounds like another agenda item.
[Andres Mantilla]
It’s a, well, right now, good question, Roger. Right now, the steering committee is the manager and the steering committee is the one that makes that decision. So, but not, but to that point, bringing that decision back to the steering committee for discussion. Barton, still can’t hear you. I’m sorry, if you, if you want to put it in the chat, or if you want to email Cheryl, we can, we can circulate that comment. Okay. Thanks everybody for a really productive and robust meeting. We’re going to be adjourned. Thanks.
1This is a machine-generated transcript generated on the fly by Google/Youtube/AI. Accuracy totally not guaranteed. Provided only as a convenience and to help people with disabilities. Caveat lector!