SAN JOSE, Calif. (KRON) -- The ongoing debate on what to do with the Reid-Hillview Airport (RHA) located in East San Jose continues.
On Monday, San Jose City councilmembers Sylvia Arenas and Maya Esparza held a press conference near the airport to bring awareness of the dangers they say the airport has brought upon surrounding communities.
“It has long been horrible to this neighborhood, we’ve known about these lead impacts for many years, the plane crashes have been a constant since this airport was expanded,” said Maya Esparza, San Jose District 7 councilmember.
“The community, parents especially have for decades, for decades, have raised concerns about what the lead is doing to their children,” Esparza added.
“There’s always this fear in the back of their heads about children playing in a park in the flight path of an airport that has a history of plane crashes.”
RHA sits on nearly 200 acres of county-owned land where many private plane owners, flight schools and other air traffic take off -- with more than 500 takeoffs and landings every day.
Supporters of keeping the airport include San Jose attorney Jim McManis with McManis Faulkner -- who filed a First Amended Complaint earlier this year against the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors -- alleging misusing $400,000 in taxpayer money to “investigate alternative land uses for RHA," and more.
“The county has neglected the airport, let it go, it's becoming a wasteland out there, they’re not maintaining it, it's not safe, it's not secure, and they’re wasting a valuable county asset by doing so,” said McManis.
“The airport has been out there for a long long time, before any housing was built around there and I get it, a lot of people don’t like the airport and I respect that.”
Housing advocates and local community members suggest the land where the airport sits can be instead used to add recreational parks and affordable housing to help address Silicon Valley’s ongoing housing crisis.
“I think that the supervisors are very well-intentioned in what they’re trying to do here but they’re just doing it wrong, housing is a big issue, we know that, it's important … wasting money on this quixotic effort to do something that they’re not going to be able to do, I think is a big mistake,” said McManis.
“There may be all kinds of things we can do to solve the housing problem and that’s the main thing that we’re worried about here, you can’t do that, you can’t do it at the airport, it's going to be an airport forever.”
A 2008 study by the EPA ranked Reid-Hillview 25th out of 3,414 airport facilities across the country with an estimated 580 kilograms of lead emitted annually -- prompting the EPA to monitor the airport for “expected lead emission from piston-engine aircraft utilizing the airport," according to the county's Airport Business Plan Update from 2017.
The plan also highlights the airport increased flight operations from 141,006 in 2008 to 162,648 in 2017-- suggesting nearby neighborhood children and communities are exposed to more airborne lead pollution than at the time of the study.
“That means our children are dealing with not only poverty because this is a lower-income neighborhood, but now they’re dealing with the side effects of blood poisoning which can turn into learning disabilities, reduced IQ, hyperactivity,” said Sylvia Arenas, San Jose District 8 councilmember.
“All of that is educational and impacts that we have to mitigate, now we have to invest from our schools and from our homes energy and money to course-correct,” Arenas added.
“When we can just close this and not create some of those impacts for these families.”
In attendance at Monday’s press conference was 20-year-old Brisa Rojas -- who lives nearby and tells KRON4 News the airport sits dangerously close to where a diverse population of families lives -- fearful of what’s passing by them from above.
“A lot of the neighbors have concerns about the planes crashing because it has happened in the past and it has happened really close by … one of them landed in one of the homes near my house,” said Rojas.
“You start to think 'what if it was my house?'”
Supervisors are now set to review a report from the Roads and Airports Department on how shutting down the airport would affect the region's capacity for disaster and emergency response at Tuesday’s board meeting.
from KRON4 https://ift.tt/3f5MMhm
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