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Can you afford two cents a day? On average,
that's what people in the
airport communities have been paying to support the effort
to keep the
third runway from hammering their communities.
When the Port issued its $1.1 billion
dollar budget estimate for the third runway in late June,
it launched quite a smokescreen trying to shift blame
onto people in the airport communities, supposedly for
delaying
the project unnecessarily. Part of this campaign was
a bunch of complaints about the money that the airport
communities
had spent in challenging the project. One letter to the
editor in the Seattle Times said that ACC cities had
spent $15.6 million to date.
This issue, we are once again reporting
that the Port has totally failed to budget any money for
mitigating the immense damages this project will cause
the neighboring communities. Was this too much to spend
defending ourselves from those damages? Over the last 12
years, it works out to less than 2.2 cents a day per person
for the 166,000 people who live in the five cities that
have been paying the bills. It’s been more in some
cities, less in others. It’s been more in some years,
less in others. But over-all, it’s just 2.145 cents
a day per person, or $7.83 per year. Moving or replacing
just one school or one retirement home will cost more.
We call it pretty cheap insurance against irreversible
damage. The Port & its pals claim to be
horrified that the communities spend this two cents a day
to resist a bad plan. We say it’s cheap at three
times the price, or ten times. The communities certainly
can afford to put up two cents a day per person to resist
for as long as it takes--until the Port is
forced either to abandon the runway or to provide full
and fair compensation for ALL the damages from the runway
project. If you’re attacked by an irresistible
force, you need to become an immoveable object--even
if it costs you two cents a day.
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