Rockland a tough audience

Rockland a tough audience
By BOB BAIRDTHE JOURNAL NEWS
(Original publication: July 29, 2007)
The Federal Aviation Administration's Steve Kelley admitted during his recent visit to Rockland that the agency dropped the ball when it came to notifying the county about a plan that could mean hundreds more planes flying over us daily.
What they probably didn't expect, but found out pretty quickly, is that Rockland residents would pick it up and run with it.
A quick, vocal reaction from our residents isn't anything new.
We've done it before and we'll do it again - in this case tomorrow evening when the FAA holds a Town Hall-type meeting - not an official public hearing - at the Joseph T. St. Lawrence Center on Torne Valley Road.
The reality is, we shouldn't be having to play catch up.
Some of the region's officials - notably Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano - were upset enough as long ago as June 2006 to have mobilized their constituents. That's when Westchester added a page to its Web site that made it possible for residents to create e-mail postcards expressing their concerns to the FAA.
Spano was worried that many more flights were going to pass over 11 Westchester communities and Indian Point.
We might not have had an interest in La Guardia Airport flights over Rye Brook, Yonkers and Larchmont, but flights over Indian Point should have set off sirens.
And it might have prompted some wonder about what unimagined impact the plan held for us.
County Executive C. Scott Vanderhoef's spokeswoman says Vanderhoef was aware of the potential for increased flights over Rockland back then, but opted to work behind the scenes, with then-Rep. Sue Kelly, to pressure the FAA.
Even after my colleague Khurram Saeed wrote June 26 about an FAA meeting coming up two nights later in nearby Woodcliff Lake, N.J., the only Rockland official at that meeting was county Legislator Pat Withers.
There were some Rockland residents in the crowd of 1,000, but no other elected officials.
Our report on the meeting, which became so tumultuous that police had to be called, awakened other officials to the issue.
The day after the meeting was held, Rep. Eliot Engel wrote FAA Administrator Marion C. Blakey. "It is outrageous that you are proposing a change that will affect thousands of people in this county without so much as soliciting comments" from Rockland residents, Engel wrote.
Engel worked with Withers and others to get a meeting in Washington with FAA officials. They came away with a better understanding of the FAA proposal to redesign metropolitan area airspace to make flights safer and more reliable in terms of on-time performance.
They also came away with a greater understanding that there could be considerable impact on Rockland communities - Monsey, Chestnut Ridge and Pearl River, in particular - and that we had been left out of the process.
A distribution list for the plan's draft environmental impact statement shows it was sent to Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Reps. Engel, Sue Kelly and Nita Lowey and Gov. George Pataki. Additionally, it was sent to officials at Stewart International Airport, Westchester County Airport, the director of the Yonkers Planning Bureau, a regional director of the state Department of Transportation for the Lower Hudson Valley and Walter VanDunk of the Ramapough Mountain Indians.
The Supervisor of Woodstock is the only town official I could find from the entire region. There's not a single county, town or village official or agency representing either Rockland or nearby communities in Bergen County - which may explain why the meeting in Woodcliff Lake turned so heated.
After that meeting, Ramapo Supervisor Chris St. Lawrence almost instantly invited FAA officials to appear on his "Live from Ramapo Town Hall," show on Cablevision. Town officials ended up hosting several hundred residents in the town council chamber, two other Town Hall rooms and gathered around televisions in the parking lot. The meeting was streamed live on the Internet, with questions e-mailed in by viewers. In short, it was an extraordinary multimedia effort to get information to the most people possible. Engel, stuck in Washington for key votes, phoned in during the meeting.
That night, Montebello Mayor Jeff Oppenheim suggested shifting the path of incoming Newark flights slightly to the west to put them over what is mostly parkland. The FAA's Steve Kelley said the agency could look at that option, assessing the impact on other communities and on space for departing flights.
The result was that Rockland gets to do it all again tomorrow night at the St. Lawrence Center, this time in a setting that makes the questions and issues raised part of the public record.
Engel, who had worked unsuccessfully this week to try to cut off funding for the FAA's study, was pivotal to getting the meeting Monday. He's even worked with Rockland Community College officials and others to provide shuttle bus service to the meeting from Pearl River.
A grassroots effort has also kicked in, with Pearl River attorney John J. Tormey III working to gain access to color slides depicting the flight path over Rockland. There's also a new Web site, www.saverocklandairspace.com. It makes no claim of objectivity, but provides another source of information and another forum.
We haven't always won, but Rockland has been a tough audience for unpopular plans, turning out in large numbers to express displeasure with projects like proposed electric generation plants in the Torne Valley.
If we hadn't made our concerns known so clearly, it's worth noting, one of the plants would have been built at what's now the Joseph T. St. Lawrence Center.
Reach Bob Baird at rbaird@lohud.com or 845-578-2463. His column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.