Draft EA - San Diego International Airport

SCOPING MEETING - 11/16/2011
Page 10
1 the surface parking lot or long-term parking lots'
2 shuttle vehicle.
3 This will remove those vehicle trips, those
4 shuttle trips from the City-dedicated streets and
5 provide a connection from the Northside to the
6 Southside, avoiding the intersections along North Harbor
7 Drive at Laurel and Pacific Highway.
8 So these are the components that are being
9 analyzed as what we call collectively the Northside
10 Improvements.
11 I'd like to recap the primary purpose for these
12 improvements. They are to accommodate air service
13 demand through the planning horizon year of 2020. All
14 of these improvements that are described will be
15 evaluated with the assumption that they will be
16 constructed and begin operations beginning in 2015.
17 And another purpose of this project is to
18 efficiently utilize the airport's property and existing
19 facilities, as well as to also relieve airfield and
20 terminal area congestion, in terms of separating and
21 increasing the separation between some of the aircraft
22 movement areas and general aviation and air cargo.
23 Some other points related to the need for the
24 project are to meet the FAA's criteria to maintain
25 category one instrument approach, or instrument approach
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1 for aircraft, and also provide general aviation air
2 cargo and ground transportation facilities to meet the
3 project demand through the year 2020.
4 With that, I'll turn it to Steve Culberson, who
5 will describe the Environmental Review process.
6 MR. CULBERSON: As Ted mentioned, the airport
7 adopted a master plan and conducted an EIR on the master
8 plan in 2008. That was a State environmental review
9 process under the California Environmental Quality Act.
10 And then in September of this year they
11 certified a supplemental EIR which examined the proposed
12 Northside Improvement projects; and those documents, as
13 Ted said, are available on the Authority's website.
14 So today this process -- the scope of process
15 is the kick-off for the Federal Environmental Review
16 process under the National Environmental Policy Act.
17 We will be preparing an environmental
18 assessment which will look at the purpose and need for
19 the proposed action, why these projects are needed at
20 the airport, alternatives to the proposed action, and it
21 will describe the affected environment, and it will look
22 at potential environmental effects of implementing the
23 proposed action and any feasible alternatives.
24 The draft EA will be released early next year,
25 and it will be released for public and agency review.
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1 After the comment period is closed, we will look at the
2 comments that have been received, address those
3 comments, go over them with FAA, and develop a final
4 Environmental Assessment; and then FAA will take that
5 final Environmental Assessment and issue a finding on
6 the projects.
7 The preliminary alternatives that have been
8 identified to date are -- besides the proposed action,
9 which Ted has described, include use of other airports
10 or other locations on airports.
11 And NEPA also requires that the FAA consider
12 the no action alternative. The no action will be
13 the -- what the proposed action and other alternatives
14 are compared to to determine the extent of environmental
15 effects.
16 And with that, I'm going to turn it over to
17 Tony, who is going to talk a little bit about some of
18 the environmental effects that will be examined.
19 MR. SKIDMORE: Thank you, Steve.
20 Good evening. The FAA requires that a variety
21 of topics be addressed at an Environmental Assessment.
22 On your screen are the 19 categories of topics
23 or environmental issues that must be addressed in an
24 Environmental Assessment.
25 The document for the proposed action will
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1 address all of those issues, although some of them, such
2 as farmlands and wild and scenic rivers, the analysis
3 will be limited to simply noting that those resources
4 don't occur at the project site.
5 Other topics, about a half dozen in particular
6 that I'll go over, we'll provide a close look at, such
7 as air quality. The Environmental Assessment will look
8 at the potential impacts to air quality from what are
9 known as criteria polutants, carbon monoxide, nitrogen
10 oxides, things that are regulated by the U.S. EPA.
11 The air quality analysis within the EA will
12 also look at greenhouse gases which are becoming an
13 increasingly important issue within environmental
14 documents.
15 The EA will look at compatible land uses, and
16 in that regard we'll look at the relationship of the
17 proposed improvements to all of the applicable plans and
18 programs for the airport, as well as for the military.
19 Construction impacts will look at air quality,
20 noise, and traffic impacts associated with construction
21 of the proposed improvements. Cumulative impacts, in
22 addition to the impacts of proposed Northside
23 Improvements, we'll look at the larger picture, what are
24 the collective impacts of all of the master planned
25 improvements, as well as other relevant projects in the
4 (Pages 10 to 13)
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