Having knocked on many doors, attended multiple City Meetings, and living under part of the new flight path, I know that jet noise is a real issue for residents of HB. In fact, during our General Plan Update early last year, I began sounding the alarm by asking to include a policy statement in our Hazards section of the General Plan – “HAZ 7 – FAA – Work with FAA on routing flights into Long Beach using NextGen to be more efficient for noise, potential crash stops and to send planes over unpopulated areas of the City.” – Unfortunately, I couldn’t convince enough of the Planning Commission and ultimately the City Council that this was an issue that was going to become a major problem. I had been following the NextGen system from the FAA for several years and was surprised to see so little attention paid to this issue. As a Councilmember I plan to make sure the City acts proactively to threats to quality of life and not reactively. A recent example of this was my lobbying the City Council to get a moratorium in place for electric dockless scooters. Two weeks after we got our moratorium in place, one of these e-scooter companies dropped 300 of them off on the Newport Peninsula! I saw an coming issue, helped create policy and lobbied for its implementation, thus avoiding a serious quality of life issue.
With regard to Jet Noise, I will continue to work with our member of Congress to support efforts to amend FAA policy, work with Long Beach Airport and the Chief Pilot of JetBlue to hopefully adjust flight paths to both raise the altitude of planes coming in and scatter the flight patterns. Additionally, I will work to create a coordinated campaign for residents of Huntington Beach to reach out to friends and relatives in other Congressional Districts and States to ask them to call and write their members of Congress to elevate this issue so that federal law can be changed (We also need this done for Sober Living Homes).