Response to City Council Referral Regarding Reactivating the Airport Operations Committee to Address Impacts from the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) NextGen Program by Authorizing the Mayor to Send a Letter to Representative Barbara Lee; Reactivating the Ad-hoc Airport Operations Committee to Oversee NextGen Issues; and Adding NextGen to the City’s 2016 Legislative Program.  (Community Development 481001)
So we've moved fairly rapidly. We have three recommendations for you this evening, and it's basically reactivating. One of the recommendations is reactivating the airport operations committee. The airport operations committee was never officially disbanded, but we can kind of just restart it up. Staff is proposing to start it up on an ad hoc basis. We have a couple of volunteers already. We have Walt Jacobs and we have Bersani. Both have volunteered and we're looking for a retired professional pilot. If there's any retired professional pilots out there that anybody knows, please call the city manager's office and give me their name . Jim Hager. Yes, we. It's a very technical thing we're going on right now with the gen program. We're really asking for a kind of a left turn early on. So it's kind of a technical situation. So staff is recommending to bring in the committee on an ad hoc basis and deal with these technical issues and start drafting letters to the FAA in Washington. We have a draft letter attached to this item this evening going to Representative Barbara Lee. We kind of vetted that letter with our federal lobbyists. They strongly suggested that we have kind of a more local angle in that letter than just the broad NextGen. And so to that end, Matt Farris, Lonnie here is going to be drafting us a paragraph to inserted into that letter tomorrow morning that addresses the request, the left turn request that we actually need to avoid noise within the city of Alameda. So we will be incorporating that one paragraph and all councilmembers and the mayor will be copied on the letter. May I ask a question, member Ashcraft, just for the benefit of everyone in this room who possibly doesn't know what you're talking about. Can you just summarize? This is a really interesting and I think an issue that is would be of importance to many of you. So just, you know, how did we get to this point? How we got to this point? We've had dealings with the airport off and on for a great many years. We were sued by the airport at one point and then we through the airport at one point. We currently are operating under the second settlement agreement with Oakland Airport, and that's actually operating very well. The second settlement agreement, the airport's complying with that. During the four years when we were going back and forth with the airport, we formulated the airport operations committee. This was a number of people that sat on this committee. They advised staff and the council regarding air operations out of the Oakland airport and noise reduction. There is also class formed community. Yes. Right? Yes. And that was yeah, it was class that was form. There's a number of organizations. There's an organization in Berkeley. We're trying to we're outreaching to all of those organizations were outreaching to the city of San Leandro, the city of Oakland. Montclair has some impacts from this next gen. The next gen thing was an initiative by the FAA to simplify the air routes within the United States. And in doing so, that kind of condense those routes. And in condensing the routes, they created additional noise problems unintentionally. And so that's really where we are today, is addressing this next gen. The South Bay and the West Bay have organized significantly over there and are strongly lobbying the FAA to look at this. Again, we will be joining that effort with them to to lobby our federal representatives. That we're also adding to asking you to add this to our 2016 legislative program. That's why for you, we could not send this letter without getting that added to the legislative program that we're asking that we're asking to reactivate the Ad Hoc Airport Operations Committee, and we're asking to authorize a letter to Barbara Lee with that additional local annual paragraph. That concludes my report, and I am here for question. And I wanted to start with number de Sock. This was. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Horn. Great to see you back, by the way. Next gen basically is the FAA is transitioning the flight path to into a satellite based path. And as a result of doing that, communities across the United States, including in California, have been experiencing incredible amounts of noise. What that also means is that many communities in trying to deal with that with the FAA are beginning to organize. And so at the leadership of of the late Dave Needle and also at the leadership of Walt Jacobs and Mrs. Barbara Talia and also the late red was well rather Weatherill. Many members of class you know they've really been encouraging us to begin to also mobilize because you know many cities are going to begin to mobilize and we need to know and what they're going to seek isn't necessarily in the best interest of Alameda. For example, after the last airport noise for a meeting that I attended, there were a lot of Montclair residents at the noise board meeting, and they were clamoring all about this. So I appreciate staff's recommendation and bringing us forward because we do, as Mr. Jacobs said. While Jacobs said, we do need to be a presence at the table in staff's recommendation, also working with our lobbyist in in Washington DC is also key too. So I really appreciate that. I think, you know that we've got a lot on our plate tonight, so I think we need to move forward. So I'm going to move staff recommendation and encourage also that we vet any people through class as well. Thank you. And we do not have any speakers on this item, so I'll second. All right. So there's a motion. And second, any questions, comments, all of those. And I just want to just add two quick things. One, it's great to see you back. Thank you. And I'm really glad as someone who used to live right in that flight path, I'm glad that we're examining that that left because a lot of pilots do it voluntarily. Right. A lot of them, particularly the freight airlines that come at two and three and four in the morning, refused to do it. So I appreciate that. Thank you. And I also want to add that I was able to speak with Barbara Lee Council Representative Barbara Lee, staff on this issue. They are already trying they are already working on this issue. However, it is important that we take these steps so that it makes it easier for them to argue on our behalf. Okay. That being said, all those in favor, I am curious unanimously. Thank you very much. Oh, all right. Next item six. Be as in boy. And I do have a question. Does this item need to be heard tonight or what's your time estimate? We would like to have this item heard tonight because there's a long lead time for some of the steps that we have in front of us. Okay. Do we have any public speakers on this item? No. We will. We can go through it fairly quickly. Okay. We could do that quickly because we have two other items that do have public speakers. Okay. So let me I'd love to dismiss this by term, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. Okay. Go ahead. So very quickly, as councilor will recall, last October, we came to you for authorization to proceed with a survey essentially to determine if our voters were interested in actually taxing themselves for city services and if they were, which of those services were important.