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Airport Group Charges Deceit

Posted on: Friday, 8 July 2005, 03:00 CDT

A citizens group opposed to airport expansion claims Witham Field managers hoodwinked the Federal Aviation Administration into approving a runway-lengthening project seven years ago.

Managers of the county-owned facility forwarded a map of the proposed project to the FAA that failed to show the five streets and cluster of homes north of Monterey Road that fell into a restricted area known as a "runway protection zone" when Runway 12/30 was lengthened 460 feet, the group claims.

"The FAA was not aware of the residential areas northwest of the airport," said David Shore, president of Witham Airport Action Majority. "The FAA was duped, as was the county commission and the rest of the public."

Shore makes the claim in excruciating detail in a 35-page "white paper" that began circulating Saturday. The report claims that the homes are at increased risk as aircraft roar over their roofs during takeoffs and landings.

Runway protection zones are trapezoid-shaped imaginary boundaries extending more than 1,000 feet beyond the ends of runways, areas that the FAA prefers remain vacant.

"The purpose of this is to protect people and property on the ground," FAA spokeswoman Katherine Bergen said.

Exceptions are not uncommon, including residential development, Bergen said, and the FAA grants them case by case.

"Many of our runway protection zones have development in them," Bergen said. "Hartsfield in Atlanta has a Ford motor plant in its runway protection zone."

Once the FAA gets a copy of the report, Bergen said, it will ask county and airport officials to respond to the charges and determine whether action is warranted.

Airport Manager Mike Moon, who spearheaded the project, was on leave and unavailable for comment.

"We have no evidence that it is not safe," Rusty Chapman, manager of the airport division for the FAA's Southern Region, said of the runway.

County officials are waiting for an FAA grant to begin buying homes on 19th Street in a voluntary program that will allow residents who complain about noise and plummeting property values to move away. Other homes are slated for free insulation.

None of that would have been necessary if the runway weren't lengthened in the first place, Shore said.

"It's been looked at a couple of times," Martin County Commission Chairman Lee Weberman said. "It wasn't illegal, unethical or immoral. This is all about trying to get people inflamed again. It may have been a poor decision at the time, but that's all there is to it."

Commissioner Susan Valliere, who campaigned to stop airport expansion, said she plans to confront Moon about the allegations.

"I am very concerned about this," she said.

Lynne Pine, a former president of the Witham Airport Action Majority, said 7-year-old correspondence she discovered between airport managers, the FAA and an airport neighbor, the YMCA, suggests that federal officials were concerned about development in the runway protection zone.

FAA regulations "prohibit places of public assembly such as office buildings, churches, schools, shopping centers, etc., from being located in the RPZ," an FAA administrator in Orlando wrote to Moon on March 8, 1999.

Moon requested the guidance after the YMCA asked to build athletic fields on property leased from the county that fell within the runway protection zone. The FAA administrator mentioned potential exceptions for structures in the zone but declined to give a firm answer without a site plan.

The fields were allowed.

"Obviously, they make exceptions," Pine said of the FAA. "They bent the rules for Martin County."

- jim_ash@pbpost.com

Source: Palm Beach Post

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