I know a thing or two about NIMBY activism. When Charley Royer was mayor, I lived in a neighborhood

Let s see so the Seattle Times consistently opposes spending tax dollars to build a light rail system approved by a popular vote of the people, yet it supports spending tax dollars to build a passenger terminal at Everett s Paine Field to support commercial airline service that is widely opposed by the surrounding neighborhoods.
Maybe the Blethen family has some money in the airlines involved or some local businesses nearby. I ve never trusted the opinions of this family newsletter (Times) like it s whining about the estate tax they don t want to be stuck with (which 99.5% of the public will never pay).
Maybe the community in the paper s thinking is a little broader than just the neighborhoods around cruise deals canada Paine Field? I imagine commercial service there might be of benefit to the greater Northern King/Snohomish community as a whole, no?
But I am in favor of somewhat limited commercial flights out of Paine Field. As it is, it takes me an hour to drive to SeaTac where I have to arrive about two hours before my flight to make sure I have enough time to navigate security and still make the flight without getting bumped.
That means I really don t save much time by flying to Yakima, Spokane, Moscow (Idaho), Vancouver (B.C.), or even Portland. By driving I still arrive at those destinations either before or at about the same time I would if I had flown.
But the devil s in the details, especially when discussing limited flights. If Southwest gets into Paine Field, they would use it to bypass SeaTac altogether (in order to avoid the improvements fees), cruise deals canada and we would have Boeing 737 s landing at Paine Field every ten minutes or so. I wouldn t mind some limited operations by Horizon, or a similar small carrier, though.
If Paine Field gets to be a big airport, with lots of people coming and going to it, wouldn t there need to be better roads leading to the airport? How would the Seattle Times feel about public money being spent to enlarge the roads leading to the airport to handle the new traffic? If they re against it, at least that would be consistent with being against light rail to SeaTac.
I agree with rhp6033 @6. Like most people in Edmonds, I would hear the increased Paine Field traffic. Because I fly to distant places, I would not receive cruise deals canada any direct benefit from increased airline service to Paine. However, refusing to take advantage of this excellent (and already cruise deals canada existing) airport is ridiculous. Imagine the hassles of building a new airport anywhere else.
Since building another cruise deals canada major airport anywhere else in Western Washington isn t feasible, Paine Field (and perhaps a few other neighborhood airports ) is probably the best solution to the increasing congestion at SeaTac. Remember that in the L.A. area, there are several alternatives to the mega-airport which is LAX: Burbank, Long Beach, Ontario, etc.
I love flying into Burbank when we visit my wife s family. It reminds me of the old days of flying. Upon arrival, the aircraft cruise deals canada taxis to the gate, the doors open and a stairway is rolled up. You walk down the steps onto the tarmac, and just thirty yards or so more to the terminal. Once in the terminal, you are within a stone s throw of baggage retrieval and the doors exiting the terminal. Her father is usually cruise deals canada waiting at the curb with the car, we jump in and drive fifteen minutes or so to get to his house.
@2 Why should the people living near Paine Field put up with all the problems cruise deals canada faced by the neighborhoods around SeaTac for the convenience of people in South Snohomish/North King County? Are you willing to pay for soundproofing their homes, and to pay them for the diminished value of their property? If you want Paine Field airline service, you ll have to.
It s been my experience that people who decry so-called nimbies (proper spelling of acronym: NIMBY, for Not in my backyard ) invariably are those who don t have any impact projects in their neighborhoods and never will have because of their money and political clout.
McGinn cruise deals canada s going to shitcan cruise deals canada 200 fat-assed managers at city hall. Think the public will feel reduced service levels from government ? I don t. He s showing what every government should do knock deadwood out of the forest canopy.
I know a thing or two about NIMBY activism. When Charley cruise deals canada Royer was mayor, I lived in a neighborhood targeted for a huge municipal incinerator. (Back then, they called em waste to energy plants.) Of course, the people who lived there didn t want it in their neighborhood. (Visualize 200 garbage trucks a day rumbling down your residential street, a 200-foot-high smokestack spewing mercury, dioxins, and other carcinogens into your breathing air, and everything in your home coated with toxic dust.) Some folks called us NIMBYs, in a disparaging tone of voice.
One day, eight of us were sitting around a kitchen table when someone said, We can t defeat this incinerator just by saying we don t want it in our neighborhood. cruise deals canada We have to come up with an alternative.
All the residential recycle you see today in Seattle and King County was born in that moment cruise deals canada at that kitchen table. Of course, the eight of us didn t accomplish that by ourselves. Many, many other people and organizations eventually got involved and helped make it happen. And the city politicians and bureaucrats fought cruise deals canada us every step of the way. It took a decade of door-to-door campaigning cruise deals canada throughout the city and hard fighting with city hall but we won.
I was one of those eight people at that kitchen table who threw the little snowball down the hill that started the political avalanche which became the massive regional recycling program you see today. The incinerator was never built.
I ve been careful to avoid posting personal information that would help crazies with malevolent intent to identify me. I don t want bricks or firebombs coming cruise deals canada through my windows, or people who think it s funny to report someone to the police as a child rapist knowing my real name. (If you think some rightwing freaks aren t capable of that, ask Goldy.) However, I think enough time has gone by now over 25 years that it would be awfully difficult for anyone to track down who those eight activists were.
Air traffic and noise at Paine Field has actually declined since many of its neighbors moved in there. cruise deals canada It was originally an Air Force base, with a steady stream of very noisy fighter jets. The effort to make use of what was left when the military moved out created something of an industrial park, and preserved a runway capable of handling the largest airplanes which would have cost a fortune to duplicate and which probably kept Boeing from building the 747/57/67/77 elsewhere. The surrounding property owners have been fighting ever since not only against expansion, but to get the entire facility closed. If the airfield and its associated industries weren t there, their property values might actually decline oh, wait. They are anyway.
This is somewhat reminiscent of what happened when the old Navy housing project on the east side of Magnolia was transformed into condos about 30 years ago. The new owners cruise deals canada promptly tried to sue Burlington Northern to get them to close the second largest freight switching yard in North America, which has been there since before their grandparents were born.
aRT @ 26: You ve got a good point. Even after conversion into a commercial airport, the early 707 s were very loud by today s standards, and left a cloud of smoke and unburnt kerosine fumes behind as it climbed into the air. While air traffic has increased, the relative noise and air pollution from each flight has decreased.
Major cities have more than one airport, and it s rather obvious that building a totally new airport somewhere is a worse decision that using Paine field; and sure, pay some compensation. In the end the folks protesting are going to die, and yes, they can go get their single family neighborhood many other places .so why should their wants decide the public good?
Btw you questioning my spelling of the plural, nimbies, by referring to the proper spelling of acronym: NIMBY, for “Not in my backyard”) which .isn t plural so .not relevant? And as long as you want to make this a childish gotcha game woo hoo gotcha backyard should be two words you as per the rule of acronym being the first letter of each word .kinda shows how these little gotcha are gratifying, cruise deals canada yet totally irrelevant to the main issue .ne est-ce pas?
Tell me this Roger pal. Do you want an entirely new airport somewhere else, or just no new airport so that WE are the only top 25 SMSA area (oh please, I hope I got THAT acronym right .shudder ohmygod what if a got an acronym WRONG! that would be aaaaawwwwful) cruise deals canada where we have just one airport?
cruise deals canada @31 Uh .how much got blown on that third runway at Sea-Tac? How many Federal and state dollars are spent building and maintaining freeways so Joe Pickup can make believe cruise deals canada he s a real studmuffin getting to work or going to see his Aunt Martha in Salem?
Whenever someone advocates rail transit, somebody else who s in favor of proliferating the status quo starts whining about cost, apparently ignoring that what we ve been doing for the last three-quarters of a century has actually been ridiculously expensive.
I had to go to Portland for business cruise deals canada pretty often for a number of years, prior to the inauguration of the Amtrak Cascades. Sometimes I flew, but most of the time I drove. Most of the work I was doing was in the Silicon Forest , and I could get there faster by driving (especially if I crossed the Columbia at Longview and went over Cornelius Pass) than by driving to Sea-Tac, checking in (even then!), riding to PDX on one of Horizon s death tubes , picking up a rental car and fighting the traffic across town to Beaverton. Nowadays, if I were still doing that I d probably take the train and maybe even ride the light rail out to the west side, although cruise deals canada if where I was doing wasn t close to that I d have a problem. To my knowledge, the rent-a-wreck companies still don t have cars