SAN MARTIN
– The county has retooled and recirculated environmental studies
on a hangar project at San Martin’s South County Airport, but
leaders of the community’s neighborhood group say it’s still
inadequate – and could still target it for a lawsuit.
SAN MARTIN – The county has retooled and recirculated environmental studies on a hangar project at San Martin’s South County Airport, but leaders of the community’s neighborhood group say it’s still inadequate – and could still target it for a lawsuit.
They’re also wondering this week why county supervisors are slated to make key recommendations on the study before public comments are due – and before a county-formed San Martin citizens’ advisory committee can formally review it.
It’s the second time that members of the San Martin Planning Advisory Committee say they’ve been snubbed on the hangar study. When it was first circulated last year, they said they didn’t even get a copy, although it was sent to Gilroy and Morgan Hill.
“It’s the same old thing,” said Sylvia Hamilton, an advisory committee member and president of the San Martin Neighborhood Alliance, in an interview Monday. “The process has been flawed from the beginning.”
However, county airports officials say the updated environmental study is the appropriate way to analyze the project – and that the project is part of a larger balancing act in the airport system. And the timeline wasn’t designed to exclude anybody, they say.
“We have to distinguish between the outcome and the process,” said Michael Murdter, the county’s Roads and Airports director. “I realize with any project the outcome is not desirable to some folks, but we need to distinguish that from the process.”
The county was originally expected to approve the environmental review on the 100 new hangars planned for South County Airport last year, but said they retooled it to address concerns from the county fire marshal and area residents. The San Martin airport currently has room for 178 planes. Roughly 90 park there now.
The newly changed study is due to go before county supervisors’ Housing, Land Use Environment and Transportation Committee this Thursday, where Supervisors Don Gage and Pete McHugh are slated to make a recommendation on the project to the full Board of Supervisors.
But Hamilton notes that Thursday’s meeting is scheduled before the April 24 close of public comment on the hangar study – meaning a recommendation could happen before all comments arrive.
“How can (the supervisors’) committee appropriately consider community input when the timeline isn’t even fully up for them to receive it?” Hamilton asked.
Meanwhile, the public comment period on the hangar study falls between scheduled meetings of the San Martin Planning Advisory Committee, a group the county set up specifically to advise it on land-use issues in the unincorporated community. That means the SMPAC can’t formally review the study before Thursday without potentially violating open-government laws.
“They’ve provided the information and timeline in such a way that the committee can’t respond,” Hamilton said.
They’re especially galled because they say the SMPAC was never forwarded a copy of the environmental study for review after it first came out last year. When alliance members later requested access to the county’s files on the hangar project, they said they didn’t get a response until after they petitioned a judge and got the document request slated for a court hearing.
Murdter said Tuesday that although he’s unsure whether the environmental documents were brought along, he believes the hangar project was brought up before the advisory committee in the past. The county has made special efforts this time to get copies of the updated study to residents through overnight mail and visits from airports officials, he said.
“It’s another reason for going out with an updated version, to get wider circulation,” he said.
Murdter said the meeting timeline wasn’t designed to exclude anyone.
“Unfortunately, the timing doesn’t always work out perfectly, especially when (a committee) meets once a month,” he said. “Typically, we try to time things where they can get a crack at it.” Murdter said he will make a point to the supervisors’ committee Thursday that all public comments may not be in yet.
Meanwhile, the neighborhood alliance and the county are still in conflict over the contents of the updated environmental study.
As before, the analysis is a so-called “mitigated negative declaration,” a level of environmental review that suggests there won’t be significant impacts from the 100-hangar project if the county takes specific measures in its design.
But alliance members say the county still isn’t performing a comprehensive review of all the impacts that could come with the hangars and the airplanes that will occupy them, especially noise but also traffic and wastewater quality.
A new section of the report suggests that flight activity from planes using the hangars could produce legally “cautionary” average sound level score of 60 in a radius that does include some surrounding homes, but that the levels do not cross the score of 65 that is considered legally “significant.”
“Most of the contour either lies on airport property or nonresidential property over open space, a maintenance yard and the freeway,” Murdter said.
But alliance member Richard van’t Rood, an attorney, said the analysis is out of context because the resulting noise will have greater impacts in quieter, rural San Martin.
Alliance leaders still want the county to analyze the hangar project within the scope of a full environmental impact report planned for the airport’s new master plan, which outlines provisions for growth there over the next 20 years.
While the county is in the midst of that update, officials approved and justified the new hangars last under the last master plan, which was passed in 1982. But alliance members say looking at the hangars independently is like putting the proverbial cart before the horse.
Thursday’s meeting begins at 9:30 a.m. in the Isaac Newton Senter Auditorium, 70 W. Hedding St. in downtown San Jose.
