SPITZER SOUNDS OFF ON FLIGHT DEMONSTRATION

HE WARNS THAT THE COUNTY'S FLIGHT DEMONSTRATION IS MORE THAN JUST A LOT OF NOISE

Friday evening of the County's flight demonstrations, I stood near a group of Cub Scouts and their parents at Foothill Ranch Elementary School just off the east/west departure for Runway 7 at El Toro.  The Scouts attempted to complete a merit badge exercise, but flights overhead drowned out both the adult instruction and these childrens' ability to concentrate.  I have argued and voted against an airport at El Toro.  I have also been a "watchdog" Supervisor, monitoring the deceptive tactics employed by County staff to push an airport "at all cost" in order to represent you and protect your quality of life.  The County's flight demonstration fiasco was a monument to deception.

The County staff claims the demonstration was "not scientific" and its intended purpose was "simply to show what the flights would be like, not demonstrate an example of noise impacts on affected communities." Do not be fooled.  Mr. Vince Mestre is the County's pro-airport highly paid noise consultant.  He designed the noise-monitoring program for the flight demonstration and he is also doing the noise study for the County's environmental impact report (EIR).  It will be his computer-not real world observations-that will generate a simulation model which will inevitably conclude for the EIR that noise will not be an impacting factor on South County's quality of life now or anytime in the future.  In other words, he will soon testify before the Board of Supervisors that "the noise you heard at the elementary school did not effect you." The Cub Scouts I observed first-hand, I presume, simply imagined that they were disturbed by the noise.

Vince Mestre has been in hiding since he produced the noise demonstration document. The County's seven-week delay in its release of this data is shocking.  But to one who watches the County continually manipulate data to its advantage, this tactic was not surprising.  Mestre did not even have the professional courtesy to be present at the Board of Supervisors meeting when we discussed his report.  Unlike a good detective novel, and based on how he conducted the noise monitoring, this "Mestre mystery" will not have a surprise ending.  Instead, it reveals the future tactics Mr. Mestre and the County intend to employ in producing the EIR.  This EIR will become the single most critical document to support an airport and it will frame the legal arguments in the court battles for years to come. Fortunately for us, we now have proof of Mr. Mestre's bias in the way he conducted this test which will be relevant when he is desperately trying to convince a future court of the completeness of his noise modeling for the EIR.

While I observed the flights that Friday night, I was moved by the heavy and deliberate noise of large aircraft flights off of runway 34, the north departure corridor pointing towards east Orange and Loma Ridge.  This noise-based on my unscientific noise monitor, my own ears-bounced off of the mountains as it traveled south from El Toro penetrating the Saddleback Valley.  When I studied the Mestre demonstration data, I was not surprised to see that the data logs kept by Mr. Mestre's employees for the Foothill Ranch to Coto De Caza corridor (Runway 7) failed to record the runway 34 departure or arrival noise data impacts.  The Lake Forest noise log, for example, contained no entries of noise detected from Runway 34 despite the fact that over 65 decibel noise was repeatedly detected by the noise monitor itself.  Had the noise monitor's internal memory not been downloaded to a computer, would I have known that the field employee logs were incomplete.  When I requested the complete log entry forms reflecting Runway 34 noise detection's, I was told such log entries do not exist.

After the day in and day out deceptive practices that have become commonplace, perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised by this latest deliberate absence of information. Mr. Mestre and the County know that their EIR noise data must be under 65 decibels, on average, in any 24-hour cumulative noise level (CNEL) period.  State and federal law only requires the County to mitigate noise impacts greater than 65 CNEL.  Home noise insulation programs alone cost $33,000 for the average size house.  If they fail to produce a model which delivers a number under 65 CNEL, the mitigation impact costs make El Toro financially infeasible. We obviously cannot count on the County's noise expert to record verifiable-greater than 65 decibel noise incidents-produced from heavy aircraft runway 34 impacts during real-life flight demonstrations.  What confidence do we have then that such data will be contained in the EIR when to include such computer data will cost the County hundreds of millions of dollars?

What will happen to the noise averages for the 65 CNEL calculations when the County intentionally fails to add in the noise impacts from runway 34? While you will hear the greater than 65 CNEL noise in this community daily, Mr. Mestre will be sleeping comfortably at night knowing he saved the County hundreds of millions of dollars on home insulation.  The advantage we have now is that when Mestre is testifying as an expert to defend the noise impact section of the EIR, the court and the public will understand that his conclusions are flawed because his "data is deaf" to runway 34 impacts that his technicians left off the logs.
 
This statement was provided to the website by the Supervisor.  It ran  in the Saddleback Valley News of August 27, 1999