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A new cost estimate for the Sea-Tac
third runway was presented to the Port Commission on 24
June, after four years of project creep—& project
leap.
But even with a $1.2 billion spending
plan, the Port is still seriously short-changing the people
and communities who live under the Sea-Tac flight corridors.
The last time mitigation costs were studied was in the
1997 HOK report, and
that partial estimate was in the billions. Direct noise mitigation
The most immediate impact of
a runway half a mile west of the existing main runway
will be noise under the new flight corridor. The cost
of providing insulation & obtaining avigation easements
for residential property has been authoritatively estimated
at $501 million for Highline / Federal Way neighborhoods. If
used as planned, the runway would bring arriving flights
low over much of Seattle, with comparable mitigation
costs. Call it altogether one billion. This does not
include noise insulation work in public schools. Buy-outs
Insulation won’t fix the noise
problem in some of the homes under the new corridors,
and they will have to be bought out. Nothing is budgeted
for this. School insulation
Unfortunately, the cost of school
insulation under the new flight corridor has not been
studied in detail. Some of the Highline schools will
be protected by insulation work now beginning, aimed
at correcting second-runway problems. Some will not.
If any studies have been done for Seattle schools, they
have not been made public, & the Seattle School Board
seems totally unaware of the problem. Lost property value
The Port’s cost figures omitted
any compensation to residential & business property
owners for loss of property value. A careful comparison
of Highline homes with comparable homes in Shoreline
(scarcely impacted by jet noise) shows overflight impacts
knock value down by a minimum of ten percent, with increasing
losses closer to the center line of the corridor. Add
another flight corridor half a mile west, & thousands
more properties suffer similar losses. The noise footprint —the
area of depressed values—expands as traffic grows. At
the high levels predicted by the Port, values will be
depressed in the Highline area by about $2 million a
year, for at least two decades, for a total loss in the
$20 million range. Similar losses will occur in Seattle’s
residential areas. Nothing is budgeted to cover this.
No wonder people are talking about class-action lawsuits.
Lost tax revenue
When real-estate values are depressed,
real-property taxes are depressed as well. It was calculated
in 1997 that with the third-runway in operation, Highline
cities (not including SeaTac) would lose about $295,000
a year, on average, in property taxes. This, of course,
is on top of loss of revenue because of the repeal of
the motor vehicle excise tax. The numbers will be higher
today. Local governments will feel a real pinch.
Seattle’s losses have not been figured,
but the impacted areas there would include a lot of industrial
property, which does not suffer severe loss of value from
noise. On the other hand, many neighborhoods under the
new flights are very dense, with very high land values,
or have very expensive homes with very big tax bills. Nothing is budgeted to reimburse local
government for property taken off the tax rolls by the
Port. Hundreds of homes &several businesses are gone
on the west side of the Airport. They would have paid taxes
to the city of SeaTac and to the Highline School District,
but the Port pays no compensation.
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