Small Claims Courts
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There has been some success across the county in filing suits in small claims court against airports and the counties that control them. Although the bar for proving nuisance is high in Colorado, it's possible that small claims suits can be brought for other reasons; illegal taking of your property and reasonably enjoyment therein; violating the term of an avigation easement; knowingly approving residential development in areas that were known to be impacted by local flight operations; putting citizens health and safety knowingly at risk with airport procedures and flight paths; and failing to enforce existing rules and regulations are just some ideas for a basis on which a small claims filing can be made.
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In April, Mr. Ullman, a non-practicing attorney, did something about it. He filed a lawsuit in small claims court, claiming the county owned him $5,000 because it had failed "to mitigate the continuous public nuisance of very loud aircraft flying over my home." |
Noise Complaints
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Mark R. Davis Mr. Davis has tried over sixty jury trials to verdict on a wide variety of legal and factual issues. He is lead counsel for Adams County for aircraft noise violations at DIA and has collected over 48 million dollars for Adams County and its cities. He has argued cases before the Colorado State and Federal Courts, Colorado Court of Appeals, Colorado Supreme Court and the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit |
In a June 19, 2020 Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Judgment (“Judgment”), the District Court of Jefferson County, Colorado, in Board of Commissioners of Adams County v. City and County of Denver, recounted in detail the expert testimony offered by Adams County, that fatally undercuts the traditional reliance by the City of Denver, operator of Denver International Airport (“DIA”), and airport operators in general, on “noise modeling” in place of “noise monitoring” to determine the impacts of the aircraft noise on surrounding communities.
The Judgment exhaustively recounted evidence offered by Adams County, detailing the flaws in the noise modeling utilized by DIA to document compliance with the noise provisions of the “Intergovernmental Agreement [for a new airport], (‘IGA’),” originally entered into between the two parties on April 21, 1988, when the plan for development of the new Denver airport was being initiated. |
Specifically, the IGA establishes certain Noise Exposure Performance Standards (“NEPS”), as well as a specific mechanism for calculating the NEPS, including the requirement for use of “noise monitoring,” rather than “noise modeling” to determine compliance with noise limits established in the IGA.
Despite the specific requirement for noise monitoring, Denver persisted, over the years, in the use of various noise models, insisting that they accurately depict noise impacts. Nevertheless, evidence from noise experts for Adams County established, to the satisfaction of the Court, that there was “a wide discrepancy between values estimated by ARTSMAP [noise model] and the values [ ] measured by the ANOMS noise monitoring system,” Judgment, pp. 2-3. According to the evidence presented in Court, the ARTSMAP noise model seriously underestimated noise levels as compared to those reflected on the actual monitors. Judgment, p. 22.
Ironically, the Judgment comes just 60 days after the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”), in its April 14, 2020 Report to Congress, repudiated noise monitoring on the purported ground that “real world situations” such as “monitoring” can include “various sources of error” such as, for example, traffic noise, FAA Report, § 7, which allegedly cause noise to be overstated. The Adams County Judgment, based on credible expert testimony, has, however, has undercut that claim.
Despite the specific requirement for noise monitoring, Denver persisted, over the years, in the use of various noise models, insisting that they accurately depict noise impacts. Nevertheless, evidence from noise experts for Adams County established, to the satisfaction of the Court, that there was “a wide discrepancy between values estimated by ARTSMAP [noise model] and the values [ ] measured by the ANOMS noise monitoring system,” Judgment, pp. 2-3. According to the evidence presented in Court, the ARTSMAP noise model seriously underestimated noise levels as compared to those reflected on the actual monitors. Judgment, p. 22.
Ironically, the Judgment comes just 60 days after the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”), in its April 14, 2020 Report to Congress, repudiated noise monitoring on the purported ground that “real world situations” such as “monitoring” can include “various sources of error” such as, for example, traffic noise, FAA Report, § 7, which allegedly cause noise to be overstated. The Adams County Judgment, based on credible expert testimony, has, however, has undercut that claim.
In the final analysis, the Judgment serves at least two purposes: (1) theoretically, it reinforces the viewpoint of those who live with airport noise on a daily basis and seek actual noise measurement, not mathematical synthesis, to validate their observations; and (2) practically, the Judgment penalizes the violator and thereby sets an example for other airports that might be disposed to taking a shortcut in the calculation of noise impacts. Of course, the Judgment is subject to appeal. Stay tuned for the next chapter.
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It seems it became the preferred, or possibly required, flight path for students heading to the so-called northern training area around late 2018/ early 2019, or at least that's when the Superior Airport Noise Committee noticed it and began tracking the planes on flight radar to confirm our observations. We referred to it as Jeffco/ RMMA "noise dumping" in Boulder County, and made the consultants at ABCx2 aware of it in the spring of 2019.
Exporting as much student pilot training noise as possible to Superior, Louisville, Lafayette and northern Boulder County is The Plan, and not an unintended consequence of wind direction, weather aberrations, or student pilots refusing to follow the FAA Fly Quiet Program and Noise Sensitive Areas Map. If that were the case there would be at least a few student pilots doing their maneuvers in Jefferson County. But the flight path heat maps produced by members of this group and posted here |
prove that isn't happening, not today, or any day since we began monitoring FlightAware and Flightradar24.com in early 2019. No one is denying that residents who live in Jeffco directly south/SE of RMMA's runways get the same kind of constant noise experienced by the residents of Superior/Rock Creek on the other side of the runways. But the reality is that there is no southern or western training area in Jefferson County where the student pilots do their training maneuvers, so there are no Jefferson County neighborhoods subjected to what the people in Louisville, Lafayette, Niwot and other southern, eastern and northeastern Boulder County communities experience on a daily basis, even though they are located far from RMMA. Perhaps this explains why there are so few noise complaints from other areas of Jeffco, like Arvada and Golden. Why is Arvada even on the CNR since according to their District 3 City Council member, Mr. Marriott, there is apparently little noise to complain about?
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Lead Testing
Flight School Training
Phasing Out Avgas
In Europe, higher prices for avgas and more severe environmental regulations forced airport and aircraft owners years ago to seek alternative fuels and develop more fuel-efficient aircraft. |
FAA Lawsuit
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"On Thursday, July 8, 2021, the City of Culver City and its co-Petitioner, City of Los Angeles, prevailed in the case of City of Los Angeles, et.al. v. Stephen Dickson, et al. against the Federal Aviation Administration (“FAA”) on substantially all claims, an almost unprecedented outcome for local governments against a federal agency acting within its area of expertise. In that case, Petitioners challenged FAA’s failure to perform any environmental review, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, 42 U.S.C. § 4321, et seq. (“NEPA”) before implementing changes in aircraft flight tracks that lowered altitudes and consolidated flight tracks over residential areas not previously overflown, resulting in continuing and vociferous community opposition. That challenge was brought in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit under its original jurisdiction, 49 U.S.C. § 46110, in the adjudication of challenges to FAA actions.
Because these operational changes were part of a larger national program of airspace changes called FAA’s NextGen project, aimed at reducing distances aircraft must fly on arrival to airports, Petitioners’ victory has implications for communities throughout the nation over |
which FAA has persisted in implementing flight track changes under the guise of the NextGen Project, in each and every case without the benefit of required environmental review.
Thus, the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the above case will have benefits not merely for the litigants, but for communities throughout the United States impacted by FAA’s free-wheeling approach to implementation of Next Gen airspace changes. Specifically, as a result of that holding, FAA will have to analyze and disclose potential impacts such as those on noise and air quality, for a proposed operational change, rather than following its current pattern of simply dismissing such changes as “exempt” from environmental review. In short, the decision in City of Los Angeles v. Stephen Dickson has far-reaching impacts that have not yet begun to be felt. In the short-run, it will assist Petitioners in protecting their citizens from unexpected and potentially impactful environmental intrusions on their daily lives. In the long run, it will influence not only FAA, but also other government agencies, to meet their environmental responsibilities under the law." |