CENTRAL CITY — Arthur Gallegos escaped to Gilpin County almost five years ago to help ease the symptoms of post-traumatic stress inflicted by his battlefield experience in Vietnam decades ago.
The solace of the foothills, just outside the urban noise envelope of the Denver area, gives the U.S. Army veteran the “peace and quiet” he was unable to get at his previous home in Fort Collins.
“Down below, my PTSD was out of control — at least up here it’s under control,” Gallegos said of the county best known as home to the twin gambling towns of Black Hawk and Central City. “It’s my sanctuary.”
But as federal aviation regulators move forward with a plan to reorganize and streamline flight paths in and out of Denver International Airport, Gallegos can feel his blood pressure rising. He has already noticed an increase in overhead flights in the last couple of years.
“Every now and then when I am sitting on the deck and planes come over, I flash back to air support operations in Vietnam,” he said.
Gallegos was one on a roomful of Gilpin County residents who showed up at a county commissioner hearing in Central City last week to implore their elected leaders to tell the Federal Aviation Administration it’s not fair to route more air traffic over the county of approximately 6,000 people.
The agency has been rolling out its Next Generation Air Transportation System initiative, or NextGen, over the last decade. The next phase of NextGen, dubbed the Denver Metroplex project, is nearing implementation, and Gilpin County residents are concerned that as part of the FAA’s efforts to consolidate flight paths in and out of DIA, they will become flyover victims.
At a public workshop in Boulder this year, a proposal to shift flights from the city’s Table Mesa neighborhood to the south — over Gilpin County — was put on the table.
“It’s not fair that they’re going to create a highway in the sky over tiny Gilpin County,” said Donna Okray Parman, who has lived in the Dory Lakes neighborhood near Black Hawk for four years and helped found the opposition group Gilpin Residents Refuse increased flight traffic, or GRRift. “We chose not to live by an airport, and they’re bringing it out here. We’re not fighting air travel — we’re fighting the distribution of air travel.”
Many county residents note that airplane noise is much more noticeable and bothersome where they live because the area is generally quieter than in the city.
The FAA released its final environmental assessment of the project in November. The public comment period for Denver Metroplex ends on Friday.
Pollution reduction sought
Gilpin County Commissioner Gail Watson expressed frustration that the FAA never held any public meetings in Gilpin County on its proposal while it met with residents of numerous other metro-area communities, such as Boulder, Broomfield, Parker and Aurora.
“To not come here, it’s a tremendous oversight and disservice to all of us,” she said at last week’s hearing.
FAA spokesman Allen Kenitzer said both a draft and final environmental assessment for Metroplex Denver were sent electronically to the Gilpin County Public Library. The agency, he added, held 42 meetings or briefings throughout the study area between late 2015 and December 2018, along with 12 public workshops this past spring.
“With a study area that covers roughly a third of the state, it was not feasible for every community within the Denver Metroplex Project to have an individual workshop,” Kenitzer told The Denver Post.
He said the FAA has not made any changes to flight tracks in the Denver area since 2012.
“What residents in Gilpin County may be experiencing is increased air traffic from DIA,” he said.
In 2018, DIA saw a record 64.5 million passengers move through its concourses, making it the fifth-busiest airport in the country. Last summer, DIA set records three times for the most passengers in a day passing through the airport.
The FAA casts its NextGen initiative as the “modernization of America’s air transportation system to make flying even safer, more efficient, and more predictable.” The agency wants to use satellite navigation to move air traffic more safely and efficiently in and out of airports in the metro area, including DIA, Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport and Centennial Airport.
The FAA projects that the streamlined flight paths, which promise smoother descents than the traditional stair-step approach pilots take today, will save more than half a million gallons of fuel annually at a cost savings of $1.8 million.
Last spring, agency officials pushed back at claims of increased noise during a public workshop on Metroplex in Littleton.
Lawsuit coming
But several other Metroplex efforts implemented across the country have met stiff opposition by those who find themselves suddenly living under new, concentrated flight routes. The FAA has been sued by Phoenix, Los Angeles and Baltimore over the new flight paths, and in 2017, a federal appeals court struck down the Metroplex plan for Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport.
Closer to home, the Denver Metroplex project had already run up against stiff resistance before Gilpin County residents began complaining. Civic leaders in Denver’s southern suburbs, along with officials at Centennial Airport, have for more than a year alleged that the FAA’s proposed flight paths in and out of DIA would shift hundreds of Centennial Airport-bound flights over cities such as Littleton and Greenwood Village at low altitude.
Centennial Airport officials say they plan to sue the FAA over the matter, claiming its environmental assessment is incomplete. Dylan Heberlein, senior noise and environmental planner with the airport, dug up noise complaint data at several airports where Metroplex has gone into effect.
At the Baltimore-Washington airport, Heberlein found that pre-Metroplex noise complaints went from 2,409 in 2015 to 17,223 two years later. And in Los Angeles, complaints registered at just over 8,000 in 2014, but after Metroplex was adopted, soared to nearly 275,000 last year. Centennial Airport included the data in a letter it sent to the FAA this year.
“Looking at these numbers, it’s no secret that Metroplex can increase noise complaints for any airport,” Heberlein said.
Concerns from Gilpin County are being heard at a higher level. Last month, Rep. Joe Neguse weighed in on the issue with a letter to the FAA. He said increased plane traffic over Gilpin County’s natural attractions — Golden Gate Canyon State Park and James Peak Wilderness Area — would ruin those places for visitors seeking a nature experience.
He called for the FAA to meet with his constituents in a public meeting before moving forward.
“Leaving out specific communities does not provide an accurate picture of the impact, and leaves my constituents feeling unheard and unrepresented in the process,” Neguse wrote.
And on Thursday, Sen. Michael Bennet joined Neguse in asking the FAA to provide congressional staff with a briefing on the project and extend the public feedback period for a month past the briefing.
Okray Parman said she and her neighbors don’t want to stifle air travel in the metro area — they just want it more evenly dispersed.
“We’re not crazy people — we know there’s going to be air traffic in 2019,” she said. “We use it.”
