May 21, 2007 Contact: Sue Baker
For Immediate Release 738-2000, ext. 6205
City submits 73-page objection to airport expansion proposal
WARWICK – The City of Warwick has submitted a 73-page response to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) draft environmental consequences chapters of the Environmental Impact Statement, reiterating its objections to the proposed runway extension at T.F. Green Airport, Mayor Scott Avedisian said today.
The city’s response faults the methodology used to determine the environmental, health, noise and air quality, traffic and community impacts that expansion would have. Avedisian said the city considers the study “incomplete and in need of improvement in data collection, independent narrative and comprehensive threshold assessment.”
It also strongly objects to the assessment that the some 350 families that would be forced out of their homes would easily find affordable housing elsewhere in the city, and questions the supposed economic benefits that are often cited by expansion proponents.
Avedisian, in his letter to the FAA, says he is disappointed with the study’s lack of data gathering and that he feels that the evaluation, methodology and technical analysis used in the study “do not fully disclose or explain the myriad adverse conditions that affect our community. The City of Warwick demands, and deserves, a more comprehensive assessment of the existing and long-term health, social and environmental impacts on our community beyond a bare-minimum analysis.”
“For nearly the entire time I have been Mayor, we’ve been reiterating the same concerns to the FAA and to the Rhode Island Airport Corporation,” Avedisian said when he announced the city’s report. “It is disappointing that we find ourselves in the position of having to make these same arguments, and repeat the same, very valid, concerns yet again.”
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