Local leaders don’t want an airport in Pierce County. Why is a homeless village OK? | Opinion
I’m working today, as I always do, from my home near the intersection of Spanaway Loop Road and 138th Street South. Close by is Joint Base Lewis-McCord, and as on most days, I am experiencing its considerable noise pollution.
Today the big transport plane engines are being run. At least once a week it is those planes practicing “touch and goes”— repeated take-offs and landings. They take off, turn, fly over Parkland and Spanaway at low altitude, then land and repeat. The house shakes and the windows rattle. The noise gets so loud I have to pause any conversation. When I was a student at Pacific Lutheran University, class lectures were interrupted while we waited for the planes to pass.
There are frequent night departures. It’s not unusual to wake at midnight, or 1 or 2 a.m., to the noise.
And that’s just the air base. Several times a year the army base runs what sounds like war game exercises: explosions and gunfire.
Now the state’s Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission is considering the possibility of building a new large airport in the same general area. Two of the proposed sites for this new airport are close to Joint Base Lewis McChord; in Pierce County, one site is near Northwest Trek and the other is south of Graham. Each would increase the heavy noise pollution local residents already experience.
Elected officials from Pierce County wrote a letter objecting to building an airport in rural Pierce County, pointing out that the proposed sites in their jurisdiction lack the transportation, sewer and water infrastructure to support such an airport. They state the sites are “outside the boundaries of the Public Transportation Benefit Area and no transit service is available or planned . . . Providing the required infrastructure is likely cost-prohibitive and brings with it concerns regarding development and growth outside the Urban Growth Area.”
OK. All good reasons in my mind.
Now consider that, simultaneously, Pierce County wants to locate a large homeless village on 80 acres near Spanaway Loop Road and 176th Street South, not far from the proposed airport locations. Don’t their objections to the airport also apply to a homeless village?
Out here, we have a tiny tax base and few employment opportunities or services. We have no hospital, no technical or community college, no YMCA or public swimming pool. We have minimal public transportation. How will the homeless make their way out of homelessness in such a location? Many homeless people are traumatized. Will it help them to be near the artillery, gunfire and heavy noises of JBLM?
The County claims services will be provided for the homeless village. But for how long? And then what? All our homeless corralled together in a semi-rural area? Is it out of sight, out of mind?
Simultaneously, I’m deeply concerned, as a resident in an unincorporated area that has no mayoral oversight protection, that we are an easy dumping ground for unpopular projects by both the county and the state. Certainly, there seems to be little or no coordination between WSDOT and Pierce County.
There is no doubt our homeless situation has become dire, and, as the Pierce County community, we must do something to help. But we have over 20 cities, towns and unincorporated areas. What if each one of them took on housing a percentage of our homeless, preferably near good public transit, employment districts and affordable educational opportunities?
The proposed airport and the proposed large homeless village together are a lot to impose on any one area.
Claudia Riiff Finseth is a freelance writer. She has served on the Parkland Spanaway Midland Communities Plan Advisory Board, the Parkland Spanaway Midland Land Use Advisory Committee and the Pierce County Planning Commission.