To site something as noisy and disruptive as a heliport in a residential neighborhood is an example of exceptionally poor planning, bound to create serious problems. The point of any kind of zoning is to ensure neighborhood homogeneity and, consequently, peaceful coexistence. People who have to live with heli-skiing don’t get used to it and they don’t stop being angry about it, and they won’t until the heli-skiing industry is required to operate away from people’s homes. Haines has already endured many years of disruption and disintegration of community from this.
The citizens of Haines who live up the highway do so because they value peace and quiet. They are well aware of the hypocrisy of their being forced to live in a helicopter landing zone, while downtown residents who make the decisions are protected from even as much as a crowing rooster.
Incidentally, since this is a neighborhood nuisance issue, the usual and appropriate thing to have done would have been to ask the neighbors. Any averaging of responses that was done should only have been from within the pool of affected people. Cherry-picking numbers to prove that an extremely loud noise is actually nice and quiet is a fine example of how to lie with statistics.
As far as I can see, the only point of spending $40,000 of our money on this “noise assessment” study was to prove that the opinions of the people who live up there don’t matter.
Sally McGuire