Around 60 people and most of Longmont City Council attended a Monday town hall at the Longmont Museum that intended to clarify what the city can and cannot do regarding airport noise. When the night was over, attendees felt they learned a lot more about the latter.
“All you’ve talked about is what we can’t do,” one resident shouted out from the audience.
The town hall was led by John Putnam, part of the city’s special counsel firm contracted to provide legal advice on airport issues. He’s also the same person who led last week’s town hall on the future of passenger rail in Longmont. So, what can and can’t be done?
What can’t be done?
A lot. Even though Longmont owns Vance Brand Municipal Airport, federal regulations are posing a major roadblock.
Any restrictions on flights, whether it’s volume, time, or type, are unlikely. Putnam said that Federal Aviation Administration laws require that restrictions can’t be discriminatory or, in Longmont’s case, solely created to limit noise.
Fees can be raised but must be reasonable and justified by airport expenses. They can’t be used to make the airport into a “profit center,” as explained by Putnam.
Putnam explained there’s a substantial list of legal precedence that would make Longmont’s fight extremely futile. Several airports across the U.S. have attempted to exercise some degree of proprietary authority only to see their efforts left in vain. For example…
2005: The FAA ordered the City of Pompano Beach to stop enforcing touch-and-go bans and other related restrictions after finding it “violated federal obligations to make the airport available to the public on reasonable terms without unjust discrimination.”
What can be done?
A little. But the crux of it comes down to gathering data.
Longmont would have to prove to the FAA that planes above Longmont are posing a safety issue of some kind that affects places like homes, schools, or churches.
Concrete solutions would likely involve the collection of data that aircraft traffic is having a tangible negative impact. This would likely demand the assistance of a professional third party, who can utilize the necessary tracking equipment and provide the proper data to the Federal Aviation Administration.
How the audience responded:
In short, negatively. Event organizers intended for all audience questions to be submitted via an online portal, but attendees often spoke out of turn and outbursts were aplenty. Some quotes from the evening:
“We’re being discriminated against on the ground.”
“Airplanes are more important than humans.”
“Levi [VBMA airport manager] did it. He brought them [airplane traffic] all here.”
When The Longmont Brief asked four Longmont residents whether the town hall was effective, the replies were concise and to the point: “No,” “No,” “No,” “Hell no.”