The Haines Borough Planning Commission last week blasted a $41,300 noise study authorized by the assembly, calling the study “fundamentally flawed” and “a total joke.”
The assembly recently sent the noise study to the commission and asked the body to hold a public hearing on whether the municipality should regulate the use of helicopters for the purpose of mitigating noise.
Without taking a vote on the matter, the commission dismissed the idea of creating a noise ordinance, after members criticized the noise study and stated they didn’t think an ordinance was necessary.
Commissioners, echoing previously voiced concerns from residents, criticized the study’s methodology, particularly its use of the DNL, or Day Night Noise Level. The DNL is an average of the overall noise experienced during an entire day, meaning if there are several short, loud events in an area that is usually quiet, the DNL would indicate the area is a quiet place.
Commission chair Rob Goldberg used an analogy to explain why he had a problem with the study’s use of DNL. “It would be like me going into the library, in a quiet space, and starting up my chainsaw and running it full bore in there for a few minutes, and then going away, coming back an hour or two later, and starting it up again and running it, and then taking an average of the whole day including the nighttime, and saying, ‘Yeah, the library is still a really quiet place.’”
Goldberg also took issue with the decibel scale the study used, which didn’t reflect the impact of the low frequency sound created by helicopter rotors.
“I don’t agree with the conclusions in here. I think the methodology was faulty and I think just using the wrong scale to measure the helicopters makes the whole thing really invalid,” he said.
Commissioner Lee Heinmiller agreed, calling the study “a total joke.” “I think if you were going to spend that kind of money, you should have just bought a piece of property from the private sector up the valley and put the heliport there. And then we wouldn’t even have this discussion. We’d just own a piece of borough property that was suited for the use everybody thought it should be for and it probably wouldn’t have cost $40,000 for an acre,” he said.
Commissioner Donnie Turner said he “didn’t see much value in it,” and lamented the fact the borough spent more than $40,000 on the study.
Assembly member Diana Lapham, who voted to approve the noise study in February, said she was disappointed planning commissioners didn’t attend a September meeting hosted by Mead and Hunt, the architectural and engineering firm that authored the study.
“I think we had maybe five people in the audience when we had this company on the phone and we were going through line by line by line. That was the sad part. I didn’t feel sad about spending $40,000,” she said. “It was just a shame we did not have people in the audience that could ask those questions, because we don’t know what we don’t know.”
Manager David Sosa objected to the characterization of the study as “flawed.”
“It’s not flawed,” he said. “It may not be as comprehensive as you like, and it may not cover areas you would have considered important, but the data is accurate, the recordings were accurate and the formulas they used are industry standard.”