Risky Runway

Here's a riddle:

What

• is six city blocks long
• stands tall as an 18-story building
• weighs more than 20 million tons
• contains enough material to build three and a half Great Pyramids of Giza
• will cost more than three-quarters of a billion dollars
• and is coming soon to a backyard near you?

The answer is: the Port of Seattle's long-planned third runway for Sea-Tac International Airport—if it flies. Sorry, make that: if it ever gets off the ground. Oh, never mind, you get the idea. More than four years after the region's press, public officials, and business establishment wished the Port godspeed, the Port has little to show so far except skyrocketing cost projections; a mountain of unanswered questions about environmental impacts, traffic congestion, and public health; and several small mountains of possibly toxic dirt. And though it's the single biggest engineering project ever planned for the region, the third runway accounts for only about a quarter of the total cost of the Port's 10-year plan to turn Sea-Tac into a world-class passenger- and freight-handling facility. If the agency isn't capable of carrying out its runway plan on time and on budget, critics say, why expect it to fulfill its promises in other areas?

As the Port's construction timetable has fallen further and further behind, third-runway proponents have predictably tried to blame all delays on the usual suspects charged when any large public project runs into difficulties: the "not-in-my-backyard minority" excoriated by ex-mayor Norm Rice in a Seattle Times guest editorial in August.

No question that citizens and public officials in communities impacted by airport noise and traffic have fought the third Sea-Tac runway ever since the idea was first mentioned (see our airport timeline, below). They claim the Port has never followed through on its promises to mitigate the impact of its second runway, which went into service 30 years ago. And in recent months the Port's inability to move ahead with the third-runway plan has heartened opposition in the South End neighborhoods that stand to be most impacted by its noise and traffic. But since the NIMBYs of Des Moines, Normandy Park, Burien, Federal Way, and Tukwila have so far lost every lawsuit they've brought against the Port, runway fans have had to look for other villains this time.

They have found them among the environmental specialists and regulators in the Washington State Department of Ecology "more concerned with process than in protecting the public interest" (to quote Rice again). Specifically, Ecology is charged with refusing the Port a wetland and water quality permit it needs to begin third-runway construction. In an Eastside Journal column last month, onetime Seattle Chamber of Commerce president and developer Bob Wallace went even further, charging that, whether "as a result of ineptitude or malicious intent," Ecology had "reneged" on the promised permit and thus "stymied" the Port in carrying out its mission.

THE FACTS DO NOT support Wallace's dark suspicions. In fact, back in 1998, the Port had been granted the permit in question, but decided to take Ecology to court over some of the environmental conditions that permit required. While the judge was still looking into the matter, the Port discovered some wetlands on the construction site it hadn't previously noticed and thus had to ignominiously withdraw its own application to bring it into line with reality.

However, the more the Port's planners have tried to tweak their projections about rainwater-, wastewater-, and groundwater-runoff into line with the law, the more questionable the numbers coming out of the computer models designed to test those projections have become. The Port's second attempt to get a water quality permit was supposed to be approved by mid-June with the expectation that runway construction could begin this summer. Instead, the application has been stuck while modelers in King County's Department of Natural Resources (hired by Ecology as outside experts) wait for the Port to supply data that doesn't produce nonsense when fed into their computers.

The Port's problems providing plausible data to support its environmental plan aren't just a matter of a decimal point here or there. They are due in large measure to the unprecedented scale of the project and to sketchy prep work by its planning staff early in the design process.

Before she left last month to begin work for the anti-third-runway Airport Communities Coalition, Barbara Hinkle spent most of the 1990s serving as the Port's senior environmental officer. Looking back, she attributes much of the Port's failure to identify site and design problems in advance to a massive internal reorganization begun in the mid-1990s as the third-runway project was moving into high gear.

"A lot of the most senior and experienced people at Sea-Tac were moved into other areas just when they were needed most," says Hinkle. With the loss of staff came a loss of focus on environmental concerns. According to Hinkle, when she tried to alert higher-ups of impending problems with the third-runway design, she found herself labeled a troublemaker, even "a nonperson" within the organization. Finally, shut out from the planning process and convinced that her advocacy for environmental concerns was having no impact, she took the unprecedented step of leaving the Port to join forces with its most determined and vociferous opponents. Prior to her departure, Hinkle sent a letter to the regional director of the federal Environmental Protection Agency spelling out the reasons for her decision.