"Airplane Noise" Select Committee Chooses Leaders
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SAN JOSE – Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian today was named Chair of the Select Committee on South Bay Arrivals, a Congressionally-established committee organized to address the issue of airplane noise over Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Santa Cruz Counties.
Simitian was unanimously selected as the Chair of the Committee at its inaugural meeting on May 6th. San Mateo County Supervisor Dave Pine and Santa Cruz County Supervisor John Leopold were selected as Vice Chairs.
The Committee was formed by Congressmembers Anna Eshoo (CA-18), Sam Farr (CA-20) and Jackie Speier (CA-14) to develop regional solutions to address aircraft noise. The Committee is made up of 12 members, four appointed by each Congressional representative. Simitian was appointed by Eshoo last month.
“This is a real opportunity to make some progress,” said Simitian. “The FAA has acknowledged the problem is real; the question now is, what do we do to fix it?”
In years past, arriving flights were split into different approaches, some arriving over land, others over San Francisco Bay. These varied flight plans dispersed the noise from the aircrafts and generally prevented any one city from experiencing a disproportionate amount of noise. Recently, however, the FAA has been directing flights to approach airports along a fixed, narrow “superhighway” that leads them above many Midpeninsula and South Bay cities at altitudes below 5,000 feet.
On a city-by-city basis the numbers are startling. For Example, in 2014, the FAA received 587 complaints from Palo Alto residents, according to the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) Noise Abatement Office. By June of 2015, the FAA had received over 5,000 complaints from Palo Alto residents, a tenfold increase.
An updated FAA initiative to address noise concerns in Santa Clara, San Mateo, and Santa Cruz Counties will be released next week. The FAA’s new initiative will identify “feasible” solutions designed to address noise issues in the affected communities for review by the Select Committee.
A series of community meetings will be held to give members of the public an opportunity to hear the proposals being made and add their input to the process. While other meetings will be scheduled, the following meeting dates were approved by the Select Committee at its first meeting.
May 25th: Santa Cruz County Community Meeting
- 6:00 PM
- Location to be announced
June 15th: San Mateo County Community Meeting
- 6:00 PM
- Location to be announced
June 29th: Santa Clara County Community Meeting
- 6:00 PM
- Location to be announced
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