Group tasked with recommending WA airport site met. Here’s what was, and wasn’t, decided

The Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission chose a permanent chairperson, amended rules governing a quorum and heard from a consultant about significant airspace impacts presented by three greenfield sites under consideration for Washington’s next major airport.

But during Thursday afternoon’s three-hour virtual meeting, its first since September, the CACC did not take any action to recommend which site in Pierce or Thurston counties was a preferred host for a two-runway airport in the future.

With the clock ticking on a June deadline to offer a choice to the state, and more than three years into a site-selection process, there weren’t enough voting members present on Thursday to make a decision. One member suggested that the endeavor thus far had resulted in “a ginormous data dump.”

“And I don’t know, certainly, that I am equipped to synthesize that data,” said Steve Edmiston, a citizen representative from western Washington.

All three sites have been the subject of backlash from residents, local governments and tribal nations due to environmental and other concerns. Warren Hendrickson, the acting chair of the commission whose capacity was cemented on Thursday after no one else stepped forward to volunteer for the role, repeated his opinion that none of the sites was ripe for a recommendation.

“What I don’t think we’ve done is identify the right site yet,” he said. “I believe there’s probably an unidentified greenfield site that’s there, that we just haven’t looked at, studied and analyzed.”

After its inception in 2019, when the CACC was tasked by the state Legislature with identifying a site for a new airport to ease a projected capacity shortage in commercial flights throughout the region, the commission was presented with a bulk of information about 10 potential sites — from possible passenger volumes to their proximity to existing flood plains.

The CACC narrowed options to three in September, each with severe obstacles, setting off a wave of criticism from lawmakers and people suddenly forced to come to grips with the idea of a major aviation facility in their backyard.

Legislation was introduced in March to immediately replace the CACC with a work group that would nix any site incompatible with military operations — as the three sites are — and expand the search.

Rep. Tom Dent, R-Moses Lake, a non-voting member on the CACC who is a co-sponsor of the bill, said Thursday that he believed it was going to pass.

“Once it’s signed, then the CACC will no longer be in existence,” he said.

What will the CACC do?

Until that happens, if it does, the commission remains faced with making a decision sure to be deeply unpopular. The CACC confronted another dilemma on Thursday, when it only had 10 of 15 voting members in the virtual meeting — short of the 12 that constituted a quorum, according to its charter.

The CACC voted to shrink that quorum requirement to nine, removing a potential constraint for when it next meets in April or early May. Members opted to hold off taking any action on sites, however, worried about the optics of changing quorum rules and making any decision during the same meeting.

If the commission ultimately cannot maintain a quorum at future meetings to vote on a site, Hendrickson said they’ll report as much to the state.

“I think that the way we’re set up now, if you’re not in the majority or you don’t want a decision to be made, the easiest way to voice that is to not show up,” said Stroud Kunkle, a representative of commercial service airports and ports in eastern Washington.

Jake Pool, a lead organizer with the Coalition Against Graham and Eatonville-Roy Airports, said in an interview following the meeting that the quorum rules change was “concerning.”

“It seems weird that, ‘We’re going to hurry up and run to this end goal,’” Pool said. “It’s not just public outcry. There’s some serious issues that pretty much make these sites not viable.”

It remains to be seen whether the CACC’s report to the state will ultimately include a site recommendation or not, for quorum reasons or otherwise, but voting members seemed to agree on a few things Thursday.

The expansion of Paine Field (Snonhomish County Airport), which was left on the table after the CACC’s meeting in September, could be an interim solution to aviation capacity concerns, they said. And the research that has been presented to the CACC is still valuable.

Hendrickson also said that the city of Yakima’s desire to host Washington’s next major airport — despite his concerns about transporting people to it — deserved to be in the final report.

“This is just another piece of infrastructure, but certainly it has raised eyebrows at all political government levels,” he said. “And it’s going to be a tough one, I think, to tackle going forward for the new work group and for the state Legislature.”

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of voting CACC members present for Thursday’s meeting.