Aurora State Airport Expansion Petition

Dear Senators Wyden and Merkley, Congresswoman Salinas and Governor Kotek,

We the undersigned request your immediate intervention with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Oregon Department of Aviation (ODAV) regarding the pending Aurora State Airport master plan.

The FAA and ODAV have indicated that the only alternatives that the agencies are willing to consider for the airport favor expanding the airport onto prime farmland with a longer runway to facilitate an increase in airport use by larger, heavier private jets.

Already the FAA and ODAV acknowledge that the airport is a highly constrained site due to its location and is violating aviation public-safety standards by permitting jets that are larger than the airport is designed for to obtain safety waivers.

As area residents and business owners, we are concerned about the many negative impacts that we already experience from the Aurora State Airport and a poorly managed public planning process, including:

• Health concerns from leaded aviation fuel used by aircraft.
• Diminished quality-of-life with increasing numbers of low-flying and loud aircraft due to a non-mandatory voluntary noise-abatement plan that many aircraft operators ignore.
• Reduced residential real-estate property values due to aircraft operations at the airport.
• Increased generation of greenhouse-gas carbon emissions contrary to federal and state climate goals.
• Environmental damage to significant natural resources, including contaminated stormwater run-off directly impacting endangered salmon-bearing waterways.
• Public-safety concerns by an airport that the FAA states is violating aviation safety standards, endangering thousands of local residents for the benefit of a few select special interests.
• Proposed massive, multi-million dollar public tax-payer subsidies to commercial interests at airport for government to condemn/acquire adjacent private properties and move Wilsonville-Hubbard State Highway 551 or airport’s air traffic control tower for expanded airport.
• Detrimental harm to the important agricultural farming sector of our economy by artificially inflating farmland values due to land speculation.
• Poor public precedent to reward land speculators who seek to flip farmland into airport use located outside of an urban growth boundary.
• Inadequate public facilities for an urbanized airport use in a rural area without proper aircraft fire-fighting capacity, water treatment, sanitary sewer and stormwater drainage, and accessible only by narrow county roads without shoulders or sidewalks or public-transit service.
• Lack of any substantial study of existing airport environmental conditions, including appropriate public utilities, Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake impacts, and the presence of EPA-identified PFAS “forever chemicals” on site.
• Negative impacts to other regional airports, including Salem, McMinnville, Hillsboro, Portland and Troutdale, all of which are located in cities in compliance with Oregon’s land-use laws and are operating substantially below capacity.

With five airports in the region having runways over 5,000 feet long that receive urban services from cities and are operating below capacity with room to grow without displacing agricultural land, and an airport master plan process with insufficient alternatives analysis, there is no demonstrable need to expand the Aurora State Airport.

The proposed Aurora State Airport expansion appears to be a simple money-grab by ODAV, as the primary source of revenue for ODAV is taxes on the sale of aviation fuel. The more larger aircraft that ODAV can attract to the airport, the more money that the agency can generate, despite negative impacts to farmers, residents, the environment and climate-change goals.

The FAA and ODAV have conducted a shameful public process favoring commercial interests and airport developers by ignoring key data that demonstrates declining operations by larger aircraft and falsifying projected future operations. The agencies also made public participation in the master plan process difficult by requiring pre-registration to attend public meetings, running out of public-comment forms at the one open-house event, and stacking the planning advisory committee with airport expansion interests seeking tax-payer subsidies while ignoring suggestions and concerns raised by those who represent local jurisdictions, community members and land-use advocates.

Cumulatively, the long drawn-out 2021-2025 Aurora State Airport Master Plan process has demonstrated an inadequate public-engagement program with a pre-determined outcome favoring airport expansion.

We request your intervention to require FAA and ODAV to select an Aurora State Airport Master Plan alternative that keeps the airport as it is within its current footprint without unwarranted expansion.