Video Transcript:

Mr. ENGEL. Mr. Speaker, the Federal Aviation Administration has come up with a proposal to redesign the airspace around New York, New Jersey and the Pennsylvania area. Despite all the opposition and all the concerns of the people affected, lo and behold, the FAA made no significant changes in their final proposal. Full steam ahead, business as usual, the public be damned.

So I stand today in strong opposition to the FAA proposal to redesign the airspace around New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. Specifically, their actions surrounding the proposal to route up to 600 airplanes a day over Rockland and Westchester Counties in New York.

The FAA created that proposal with zero input from the people whose lives would be most harmed by this proposal. In fact, even when I brought this up to the FAA in a meeting in my office, it took over a week of urging before they would even agree to attend a public forum that I held in Rockland.

They also conducted this entire process over the course of several years without any kind of adequate notification. My constituents expected better and they deserved better.

Throughout this process, we have seen, time and time again, that the FAA would ignore the opinions and suggestions of myself and anyone else who would be affected by their proposal. Valid suggestions that would improve this proposal were written off without serious consideration.

The FAA is trying to push through a proposal that doesn't make sense, and they are refusing to accept any changes.

But the plan itself is not my only problem. The misleading tactics and the stonewalling by the FAA only add to this issue. Every effort I and my constituents and some of my colleagues have made has been met with bureaucratic resistance while, at the same time, the FAA has laid down strict deadlines for comments and changes.

Just as an example, I tried multiple times to get an answer for how loud it would be when an airplane flies over us. This is critical information since overflights will be happening up to 600 times a day. All the FAA would tell me were 24-hour noise averages, which tell me nothing. Noise averages mean nothing to us. A room could be silent for 23 hours and have a 140-decibel rock concert for an hour, and the noise average would be something around a whisper. This is just one example of the FAA providing incomplete or misleading information.

In addition, every document the FAA has sent to my office, from the original proposal to the record of decision, has been extremely complicated and vague. I've been living in New York my entire life, and I was unable to interpret the maps of where the planes would be flying over my district. If my staff and I, who are knowledgeable about the region, are unable to decipher the maps, how is the general public supposed to know where the airplanes will be flying over their homes? The answer is that they will not, and that's just what the FAA wants.

It would be easy for the FAA to publish good maps of the area. They could use maps that are labeled with names of cities, streets and bodies of water. They could draw lines of these maps signaling precisely where the planes would be flying and at what altitude, but they chose not to do so. They chose instead to provide strangely colored maps with very few labels, so it was nearly impossible to figure out where the planes would be routed. It is this type of complex and misleading information that makes me and my constituents distrust the FAA.

And finally, let me say the agency has deliberately manipulated information that it is giving out to be public. For example, my office sent in over 25 pages of comments from over 60 constituents. We also sent in a petition signed by nearly 100 local residents, and finally, we sent 237 pages of a transcript from a public town hall meeting held in Rockland, which was attended by well over 1,000 people. Dozens of people spoke, not one of whom supported the plan. But the spokesperson for the FAA was quoted in the newspaper claiming they had only received five comments from affected people. Five. This is dishonest. This is unacceptable from an agency that is supposed to represent all of the people in the country.

Mr. Speaker, when the Transportation-HUD appropriations bill came to the House for a vote, I strongly supported an amendment to eliminate funding for this airspace redesign proposal. I did this, not only to express my dislike for the proposal, but also to send a message to the FAA that they cannot treat Americans this way.

And finally, to my colleagues, this may only right now concern the northeast corridor, but if the FAA can get away with running roughshod over Members of Congress, over constituents, over Americans, they can do it in any region of the country. We need to fight this. This is wrong. If it can happen in the northeast, it will happen all over America. We must fight this plan.