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Sea-Tac’s
Dirty-Fill Bill Passed by Legislature;
Despite
Vigorous Opposition by Environmental Groups
The
“dirty-fill bill” designed by Sea-Tac Airport to overcome
a critical ruling by the Pollution Control Hearings Board
passed the House of Representatives on Friday evening, 18
April, on a bitterly-contested 65-21 vote. The House version
now goes to the Senate for consideration of the changes
made in the House. The Senate is expected to accept the
House version speedily, and the Governor is expected to
sign without hesitation. The runway project remains at a
complete halt, with the Port’s appeal pending in the Supreme
Court, and with an injunction in place in the runway opponents’
appeal to Federal court.
The
Senate version of the Port’s bill (SSB
5787) was passed by the Senate in March, and was then
entirely re-written by a House committee (making it even
more damaging). Official floor action on that version was
in the control of the majority (Democratic) caucus in the
House, which had acrimonious closed-door discussions, finally
resulting in the majority overriding the deep-seated objections
of legislators from districts close to Sea-Tac Airport.
In
the final days of the discussion, seven environmental groups
across the State sent a critical letter to House Speaker
Frank Chopp, pointing to serious damage to the environment
if the bill were to pass. The South County Group of the
Cascade Chapter, Sierra Club, even set up a special
page about the bill on the chapter’s website Experts
continued to supply the House with detailed
information as to the flaws in the bill till the final
hours.
Lobbyists
from the Port of Seattle worked hard, meeting privately
with as many individual House Democrats as possible to make
their pitch. On the other side, lobbyists for environmental
groups called on wavering Democrats at every opportunity.
The Teamsters Union joined in, claiming that the bill would
clear the way for 900 jobs (hauling contaminated fill to
the third-runway site during good-weather months over the
next several years).
For
a time it appeared that this anti-environmental legislation
had been successfully bottled up. Heavy pressure led by
District 33 legislators Shay Schual-Berke and Dave Upthegrove
kept the House version of the bill (HB 1876) from leaving
the Rules Committee. However, the companion bill in the
Senate, SB 5787, was rushed through the committee process
and passed by the Senate with ease. The bill received a
third, perfunctory hearing before the Agriculture and Natural
Resources Committee of the House on 1 April, and the Committee
then voted to substitute its own version and to vote that
measure out for further action.
The
Port of Seattle told the Legislature that this bill was
needed for several different reasons. None of them is valid.
Jobs.
The Port and its allies in the construction industry say
that passing this bill will “put people to work” (by removing
one difficulty that the Port has in its runway project—finding
cheap fill). But the runway project is held up by a Federal
court injunction, and by the pending appeal in the State
Supreme Court. Unless the Port wins that appeal, by its
own statements it will not be able to proceed. And there
is no source of money in sight for completion of the project—hundreds
of millions are required just to pay for the rest of the
required fill. So, passage of this bill would not be putting
people to work any time soon.
Jobs—a
second aspect. If the idea is to put money in the pockets
of temporarily out-of-work Teamsters, let’s just increase
their unemployment benefits. That saves the cost of the
fill itself, and relieves the surrounding communities from
the inevitable harm from the runway project. By the way,
the number of Teamsters who might get work assignments to
move fill seems to be greatly exaggerated.
Public
need. The public has always been told by the Port of Seattle—till
now—that the third-runway project met a genuine air-travel
need. Now the Port is falling back on the jobs argument.
Does this mean that the Port is at last recognizing that
the runway does not meet any unresolved problems for the
traveling public, or the airlines? Perhaps so.
On
the other hand, Port lobbyists appear be telling legislators
privately that there is a serious delay problem at Sea-Tac
right now, caused by lack of a third runway. Such claims
are unsupported. The third runway does NOT cure any present
problem at Sea-Tac, or any problem likely to arise in the
future. Official Federal statistics show that only about
one incoming flight in one hundred at Sea-Tac is delayed
by local bad weather.
Delay
reduction. Until the “jobs” argument came along, the whole
justification for this billion-dollar project was to reduce
(not to eliminate) delays in landing during some low-visibility
conditions—in the future, when traffic at Sea-Tac would
have reached very high levels. Before the 1991 recession,
travel at Sea-Tac had reached the range where serious delays
were predicted—and they did not occur. Travel fell
in Spring 2001 at the start of the recession and has not
recovered. Upper management at Sea-Tac have claimed all
along that travel will rebound and reach new peaks, but
their predictions continue to be incorrect, and we know
of no other professionals in the field who see air travel
reaching former levels at any time in the next several,
several years. At present, bad-weather arrival delays are
insignificant at Sea-Tac and will stay so.
“Delay”
is a vague sort of notion. To the traveler flying from,
say, New York to Seattle, delay means that he didn’t reach
home as soon as he had expected—and the reasons might
be anything from a baggage-handlers’ strike at New York
to bad weather over Pittsburgh to the usual congestion at
Chicago, and delays in the air over Sea-Tac if things are
unusually foggy. And delay can also mean problems in the
plane’s reaching a gate after landing, problems in the terminal
(clearing arriving security, finding lost luggage, finding
ground transportation), and then there are back-ups on I-5
or I-405 on the road home. It’s all delay as experienced
by the traveler. And most delay in arriving on the ground
at Sea-Tac is delay before the traveler arrives in
local airspace. Much of that delay is caused by the way
that major airlines route their flights through highly-congested
“hub” airports (like O’Hare at Chicago). Direct flights
do a lot better. Building a supplemental runway at Sea-Tac
does not cure problems at airports like O’Hare.
The
best recent assessment of delay at major U.S. airports was
the so-called “benchmark”
study done by the head office of FAA. It shows rather
clearly that Sea-Tac is not & will not be an airport
with a significant delay problem.
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