Seeking relief from constant plane traffic, a group of Monterey residents have lawyered up.

When Nancy Runyon bought her house in New Monterey in 1998, she imagined retiring there. Planes were not something she thought about – they occasionally flew by, no big deal.

But she started noticing an uptick in flight traffic over her house in 2019. Though she didn’t realize it at the time, it was because the Federal Aviation Administration had implemented its NextGen air system that, among other things, altered flight paths.

She realized her house was now in the “instrument flight path,” where planes have to rely entirely on their instruments as they approach the runway when it’s socked in by clouds, which is often. She says planes “fill the sky” above her house on a regular basis as they’re coming out of the fog bank.

“I’ve lost a lot of sleep over this, because of plane noise, but also because of worry,” Runyon says. “I usually don’t go to bed until the last plane has landed.”

Over the past couple of years, Runyon and a group of New Monterey residents formed the Monterey Fly Safe Coalition to organize and exert pressure on the Monterey Peninsula Airport District board to mitigate the problem.

Through Public Records Act requests, MFSC resurfaced three ordinances, two passed in December 1978 and one in January 1979, that collectively purport to limit the airport’s hours and regulate altitudes and touch-and-go landings, the latter coming from flight school planes.

Upon review, MPAD Counsel Scott Huber determined the three ordinances were preempted by federal law, and that parts of them were unconstitutional – the federal government has total control of U.S. airspace – and therefore, they were unenforceable and should be taken off the books.

In a presentation to the MPAD board in July, Huber said he could find no evidence the ordinances had ever been enforced, therefore, repealing them would not require any environmental review – there would be no impact. The board voted unanimously in July to repeal the ordinances, but it takes two rounds of votes to do so.

The second vote was scheduled for Aug. 20, but MFSC sent a letter Aug. 18 asking the board not to repeal the ordinances, and asserted doing so requires environmental review. The letter threatens litigation, and includes a separate, two-page list of concerns about airport operations.

MPAD’s board wanted to give the airport’s staff time to respond to each of MFSC’s concerns, so they pushed the intended second vote to a special meeting scheduled for Friday, Aug. 29. “I think we should try to get it done next week and get it put to bed,” board member Mary Ann Leffel said.

But MFSC followed up with a letter on Aug. 22 asking that the special meeting be delayed. For one, MFSC’s attorney couldn’t be present, and two, there was no urgency for a special meeting to repeal ordinances from 1978 and 1979, the group wrote.

The second vote is now scheduled for an MPAD board meeting on Wednesday, Sept. 17.