The Los Altos Hills representative on a regional committee addressing airplane noise said the Federal Aviation Administration is reneging on some assurances made that were key to committee members signing off on the most controversial of its mitigation recommendations.
In a Dec. 14 letter to FAA administrator Michael P. Huerta, Councilman Gary Waldeck said he cast a deciding vote in November 2016 on the recommendation to move the ground track back to its original position prior to the March 2015 implementation of a NextGen initiative that generated a spike in noise complaints. The ground track reflects the main corridor of flight paths coming into San Francisco International Airport. Waldeck said he endorsed the change only with the stipulation that nine criteria be incorporated into the new route.
He said the FAA’s latest “Phase Two Report,” on its mitigation efforts, “appears to renege” on at least two of the key criteria: restoring the flight altitudes over a key “waypoint” over Menlo Park and Palo Alto to 5,000 feet or higher; and designing the entire route with altitudes at least as high as the pre-March 2015 route.
“If I, or other members of the (Select Committee on South Bay Arivals) had been aware of the FAA’s determination that any of these criteria were infeasible when the Select Committee voted, the initiative would not have been approved (I would have voted against),” Waldeck wrote. “If the FAA’s proposed route change does not meet all nine criteria … then it does not reflect the regional concensus and therefore should be abandoned.”
Waldeck said the FAA needs to pursue a solution that has the backing of the affected communities – in this case, dozens of cities from South San Francisco through Los Altos down to Capitola that generated hundreds of thousands of complaints, prompting the committee’s formation and work with FAA officials.
“Otherwise, the FAA and our Congressional representatives will find themselves facing yet another group of angry residents … demanding fixes to the noise problems, and complaining that unacceptable levels of aircraft noise have been unfairly shifted onto them.”
The Town Crier plans to pursue the story in full in its Jan. 10 issue.
