Towering redwood trees surround Barry Hoglund’s secluded home near Scotts Valley. He moved here after he retired and turned it into his own garden paradise.
“Let me just be quiet for a second,” he says before pausing. “Isn’t that great?”
The peace and quiet. The singing birds. That’ why Hoglund bought this property. But now, airplanes constantly fly overhead.
“I’m outside quite a bit, which is what I wanted to do, and the noise is just an invasion,” he says.
For more than a year, residents like Hoglund from the Santa Cruz Mountains and up the San Francisco Peninsula have been living under what they say sounds like a highway in the sky. This week, the FAA responded to their concerns and their ideas for some relief.
“This noise, it’s everyday for the rest of my life as long as I live here. It’s like a prison,” Hoglund says.
Last March, the FAA enacted a new GPS-guided navigation system at Bay Area airports called the Next Generation Air Transportation System, which spaces planes closer together and changes their descent patterns to save time and fuel. But it also brings jets lower over the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Out on Hoglund’s porch early one Sunday morning, he and his neighbor Patrick Meyer chat over coffee. Meyer brought his iPad so he could look up the flights constantly interrupting their conversation.
“This is the United Airlines Flight 5339,” he says. “It’s coming in at 11,475 feet.”
They use this information to file noise complaints daily with San Francisco International Airport. Meanwhile, similar concerns have been raised at other airports where NextGen has also rolled out across the country, from Phoenix to Washington D.C.
“People don’t believe it,” Meyer says. “They just say you’re just too sensitive.”
Meyer is the co-chair of the neighborhood group Save Our Skies Santa Cruz County or SOS, which has come up with solutions for changing the NextGen flight paths.
Because of their work, the Bay Area’s Congressional representatives created another group called the Select Committee, which is made up of local elected officials from Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Mateo and San Francisco counties.
The Select Committee got the FAA to do a feasibility study that considers solutions such as changing the altitude, fanning out the flights and having planes fly over the ocean longer.
But the study, which came out this week, shows that some of the ideas aren’t feasible.
John Leopold, a Santa Cruz County Supervisor and Select Committee member, isn’t ready to give up.
“I think we’re really going to have to dig down deep in the report and question the FAA to make sure that there’s a solution part of this feasibility study or keep moving toward a solution because the impact is real,” he says.
And it’s not just a concern for the people who live under the NextGen flight paths. People like the Rice family of Zayante, who live beneath the old route that flew over the San Lorenzo Valley, are worried that the solution will be to simply revert back to the old flight paths.
“We still have planes that come by,” Jacqui Rice says. “I was awakened by a plane the other night.”
“My concern is if they move it back, with the increase in the number of flights, what will that mean to us?” says Brian Rice.
The whole community has a chance to weigh in on the FAA’s feasibility study next week.
Select Committee Meeting
Wednesday, May 25th at 6:00 p.m.
Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium
307 Church Street, Santa Cruz
The FAA Initiative to Address Noise Concerns of Santa Cruz/Santa Clara/San Mateo/San Francisco Counties Feasibility Study can be viewed here, along with the appendices and executive summary.