Airport Area Plan Update
Meeting:
Note:
The Airport Area Plan Update is being presented to the Greensboro Planning Board Wednesday, September 12th. Please come with your concerns and questions. If there are no objections to this plan, which the FAA requires to be "consistent" with the FedEx project, we put one more nail in our coffin.
The Proposed Water Variance document prepared for PTIA by airport consultants, states that FedEx has asked for parking spaces for 400 trucks, 300 ground service vehicles (tugs, fuel trucks, generators, cargo containers, etc.), 2,500 automobiles, as well as spaces for 63 aircraft. Not only will all these vehicles on the road create a huge amount of traffic and noise, but please keep in mind all the impervious surface created by these parking spaces, in addition to the impervious surface created by the various hub buildings themselves, in our watershed. Keep in mind that this impervious surface will be created in a part of the county where the "regolith" (that porous ground between the surface and bedrock) is deepest, thus where more groundwater is currently created. In a county subject to annual droughts, we all need to be aware of where our water supply comes from (i.e. 40% to 60% from groundwater that feeds our creeks and streams that feed into our reservoir lakes) and take steps to preserve that water supply, not endanger it.
Old news, but still relevant:
FYI: the Guilford County Planning Board which met several weeks ago, ordered
the Airport Area Planning Committee to reconvene and take concerns raised
on May 8 under consideration and come back to the Board on June 12, 7:00PM,
Old County Courthouse. So far,
Roger Bardsley, Guilford
County planner who spearheaded this project, has not reconvened the
Committee but instead has drawn up his own answers to the questions
raised! (Anyone else see something wrong with this besides us?)
Perhaps, if there is good participation from you folks at the Greensboro City meeting, the plan might be sent back to the drawing board again. This plan has some good points, but many faults as well--e.g. a lack of protection for folks who already live in the 55DNL (remember this is 55 decibels AVERAGE over 24 hours) which extends from inside Forsyth County to east of Battleground (to about where Greensboro Day School is). Even though 55DNL is the accepted standard limit for residences, schools, and hospitals for EPA, the World Health Organization, and the American National Standards Institute, we could not get a majority of the Committee members, many of whom are commercial or economic developers, to agree to put it on the map.
While there has been some buffer zone created around the existing main runway, there has been NO buffer zone created around where the proposed third runway is to be built, nor around the cross runway. Thousands of homes exist around where they propose to build that runway, some neighborhoods as close as one mile to that proposed runway.
Are you willing to sit back and let this happen to tens of thousands of your fellow citizens--as well as endure the Water and Air and Traffic consequences for ALL around this air and truck cargo hub?
If not, COME to the meeting, SPEAK up, and see through the nicely worded "neat" plan!