The plaintiffs and the defendant (the City of SF) wrapped up their arguments about SFO runway noise in Small Claims court on Tuesday. You can catch up on the background here and here. It's quite impressive to see so many residents apply their skills to adding to the complaint. We had members of the plaintiff group provide detailed noise measurements showing noise as high as 84.7 dB, providing background on the legal cases from around the country that might apply, and offering survey results from 360 people showing that the 49 current plaintiffs are far from the only ones feeling the damage from back blast noise.
At the end of Round 2 the defense tried to avoid having the Noise Abatement Office systems manager even take the stand, but Judge Mazzei ruled that we should be able to ask questions of him about his written declaration and the operations of the Office. Mr. David Ong was on the stand for about 90 minutes and we learned some interesting, if disappointing, things during that time. The Noise Abatement office takes about 200,000 complaints (they call them "reports") per month. That effectively blew a giant hole in their argument that the 49 plaintiffs are just a small group that is not representative of the rest of the Millbrae, B'game and H'borough populace. The illogic seemed lost on the SFO representatives.
We also learned that the airports Fly Quiet program that has been in effect for 15+ years rates airlines on five criteria that do not include back blast noise and that some of the lower scoring airlines, like Quantas, have been low scoring for a long time and SFO expects them to continue scoring low. There are small fines in place for when a pilot does a "run-up" in an unapproved area of the taxiways, but Mr. Ong did not know if any fines had been assessed, nor whether they are published to groups like the Community Roundtable (which B'game councilmember Ricardo Ortiz sits on). He also did not know what happens if an airline does not pay the fine or if there are other actions that merit fines. We all found that quite odd for a senior member of the Noise Abatement Office.
There are 29 permanent noise monitoring stations sprinkled in the three cities and San Mateo. They have been there for decades and Mr. Ong believes they do not show any appreciable increase in noise over the last three or four years (a key part of our claim). I have asked to see the actual data since the group finds that hard to believe given the increased traffic and our collective experiences. We will see if the data corroborates that, if we ever get it.
As the session came to an end, the judge said she would ordinarily have the Court mail us the verdict in a week or two, but she will be doing it differently for this case. She said she was allowed 90 days to announce her verdict once the case was under submission. She has "a lot to read over". Then she said we'd all be getting a notice of when her decision would be announced in court with so the plaintiffs could be present. Lots of people are sitting with their fingers crossed.
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