Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2016
Floor Speech
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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to urge my colleagues to support the amendment that I am offering along with my southern California colleague, Mr. Sherman.
The amendment would allow the Burbank Bob Hope Airport to implement a nighttime curfew between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. and restore local control to the community that has been denied to them for decades.
Thousands of residents of southern California's San Fernando Valley who live under the flight paths or near the terminals at the Bob Hope Airport endure the house-shaking noise of air traffic during the day and suffer the jarring interruption of their sleep that is caused by a roaring jet taking off or landing.
I want to also distinguish this measure. I know my colleagues have heard some other curfew measures today, and without detracting from them, I want to point out that the facts of this one are quite different. This is, I think, a unique case in the case of Burbank airport.
When Congress passed the 1990 Airport Noise and Control Act, ANCA, it intended to permit airports to implement noise restrictions if they met certain requirements. At that time, Congress exempted several airports from the law's requirements for FAA approval of new noise rules if they had preexisting noise rules in effect to address local concerns. So airports were grandfathered in when ANCA was passed; but because of a mistake, Bob Hope Airport, which had a curfew in place, did not get grandfathered in.
The Bob Hope Airport in Burbank was one of the first airports in the country, in fact, to impose a curfew and has a long history of curfews but, unfortunately, was not given the protection of the grandfather provision of ANCA that several other similar airports received. This amendment would correct this inequity and put Bob Hope on the same footing as several other airports across the country that had curfews before ANCA's passage.
It doesn't set a precedent in terms of other airports, and this would be uniquely confined to the situation involving Bob Hope. By correcting the omission of not allowing Bob Hope Airport to implement on a permanent and mandatory basis curfew which it had, in effect, informally in the 1980s, we would return local control to the community that has sought it for years.
It is also important for my colleagues to understand the impact this will have on aviation in southern California. There will be no impact on commercial flights--zero. Almost all commercial airlines already voluntarily abide by the voluntary curfew at Bob Hope, and the impact on general aviation will be limited to two nighttime landings. The impact, however, will be significant for people trying to get sleep that are disrupted by those small number of flights.
Mr. Chairman, I urge my colleagues to support this.
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Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Chairman, I just want to make one final point. This amendment had bipartisan support last year. It came within just three or four votes of passage. Because of the unique situation facing the Burbank Airport, I would urge unique consideration of correcting the injustice when Bob Hope was not grandfathered as it should have been.
Mr. Chairman, I urge support of the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.
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