Tag: environmental impact

Spokane County seeks second federal study of Airway Heights casino

By Mike Prager, Tom Sowa, The Spokesman-Review

Spokane Tribe proposed casino resortSpokane County commissioners are asking the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs to take a new look at possible negative impacts of a proposed Spokane tribal casino on Fairchild Air Force Base.In a recent letter to the BIA, commissioners said information has surfaced indicating that an “accident potential zone” could be extended into the area where the tribe is proposing its casino-resort.The commissioners’ letter says new information provided to the county under the Freedom of Information Act supports their request for another look at the project. They want a new study to include “outstanding questions regarding the safety of the Spokane Tribe’s proposed casino-resort project in Airway Heights,” the letter said.County commissioners have hired the law firm of Perkins Coie LLP with experts in Washington, D.C., to prepare their challenge to the casino project, as well as former U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt, of Spokane.

Commissioner Al French said he didn’t have the cost of hiring those outside consultants immediately available, but confirmed it is a substantial amount.

“This is something we are very concerned about as a board,” French said, pointing out that Fairchild contributes $1.3 billion to the region’s economy each year.

Spokane Tribe officials say the casino – part of its Spokane Tribe Economic Project – would create jobs and benefits for tribal members and attract more businesses to Airway Heights, where the proposed project would be built.

The tribe also commissioned a detailed study, prepared by Madison Government Affairs, which claimed the casino would have no adverse effects on the air base.

A spokeswoman for the Bureau of Indian Affairs said Tuesday that the agency received the commissioners’ letter and added it to the official record being reviewed.

A year ago, county commissioners submitted more than 50 pages of comments against the casino proposal, arguing it could endanger the future of Fairchild, the area’s largest employer.

The BIA allowed comments for and against the proposal to be submitted through May 1, 2013.

Since then, the tribe’s application has been reviewed by the Office of Indian Gaming in Washington, D.C. The department has not said when it might issue a ruling on the application. If approved by Kevin Washburn, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs in the Interior Department, the casino would also require approval by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee.

Commissioners say new reviews of Fairchild flight paths suggest the proposed casino would be inside an accident potential zone that wasn’t identified in the initial environmental impact statement.

Fairchild has established accident potential zones at the end of the base runway that extend in a straight line from the runway through portions of Airway Heights, south of U.S. Highway 2. The tribe’s environmental impact statement relied on the existing crash zones, which the commissioners now argue are inadequate.

Those accident zones were based on a 2007 study, which did not account for prevalent training patterns to the north of Fairchild, the commissioners’ letter said.

Charts of flight patterns show that pilots using visual flight rules often make sharp turns over the proposed casino site during takeoffs and landings. The racetrack-shaped pattern on the north side of the main runway goes directly over the casino site.

“The casino project is located right under that racetrack,” French said.

The amount of overhead air traffic qualifies the casino area for protection as an accident potential zone, commissioners argued in the 63-page letter.

County officials said they recently discovered a 2011 Department of Defense instruction that says, “Where multiple flight tracks exist and significant numbers of aircraft operations are on multiple flight tracks, modifications may be made to create (accident potential zones) that conform to the multiple flight tracks.”

The letter also states that comments from the Air Force obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act show the flight-pattern conflicts are more extensive than indicated in the final environmental impact statement.

Civilian encroachment is one factor considered by the Air Force in its periodic reviews of air bases for potential closure.

The commissioners have taken steps in recent years to address encroachment by leading a multiagency rewrite of zoning laws to provide buffers for Fairchild. Last fall, they asked voters to raise their property taxes to buy manufactured home parks in the existing crash zones, but the measure was rejected. However, a state grant is being used to buy the former Solar World housing, which has been cleared of occupants.

Environmentalists demand new climate analysis for Keystone XL

Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post

Just a day before President Obama announced he would only approve theKeystone XL pipeline if it “does not significantly exacerbate the climate problem,” six environmental groups quietly lodged a protest with the State Department charging it would do exactly that.

The 48-page letter obtained by The Washington Post demands the State Department, which has jurisdiction over the pipeline permit, prepare a new supplemental environmental impact statement to take into account several new analyses that they say prove the project will speed heavy crude extraction in Canada’s oil sands region.

The State Department is currently responding to more than 1.2 million comments on the Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement it issued March 1, which it plans to finalize this fall. In that document, the department suggested denial of TransCanada’s permit would have little overall climate impact because the oil would be extracted and shipped out anyway, largely by rail.

“Approval or denial of any one crude oil transport project, including the proposed Project, remains unlikely to significantly impact the rate of extraction in the oil sands, or the continued demand for heavy crude oil at refineries in the U.S.,” the draft assessment reads. “Limitations on pipeline transport would force more crude oil to be transported via other modes of transportation, such as rail which would probably (but not certainly) be more expensive.”

By contrast, the six advocacy groups–Bold Nebraska, Center for Biological Diversity, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, Oil Change International, and the Sierra Club–said recent evidence does not support this conclusion.

“Since the close of the comment period, evidence of inaccuracies and bias in the State Department’s review of Keystone XL has been steadily mounting,” says Doug Hayes, a Sierra Club attorney. “This new information demonstrates that the review relies on an overly-simplistic, outdated view of a rapidly-changing oil market.”

They cite several reasons for redoing the assessment’s climate analysis, including a Goldman Sachs report that questions the extent to which rail shipments can replace a pipeline slated to transport 830,000 barrels of crude per day; the Royal Bank of Canada’s estimate that denying the project would jeopardize $9.4 billion in oil sands development; and the fact that the Environmental Protection Agency filed comments in April suggesting the State Department downplayed the amount of greenhouse gas emissions linked to the project’s construction. EPA estimated the pipeline’s annual climate impact–taking into account the carbon intensity of Alberta’s oil compared to average crude oil–would be 18.7 million metric tons of carbon from the time of extraction to the time it reaches gas stations.

The groups also call on State Department officials to take into account the higher “social cost of carbon” the administration is now using, which aims to capture the negative climate impact of activities that release carbon into the atmosphere. This month the Office of Management and Budget raised that figure by roughly 60 percent.

Will the State Department do a new assessment? That remains to be seen, since the department is in the midst of finalizing its environmental impact statement, and it did not respond immediately to a request for comment Thursday.