Mayoral candidate Cam Winton hauled a vacuum out to South Minneapolis Monday to illustrate the noise some homeowners endure from airplanes overhead.
His remarks were targeted toward RNAV, a proposed method for guiding planes at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport that would concentrate air routes to create so-called "superhighways" over some areas.
The airport noise issue has drawn a lot of attention in South Minneapolis lately, with hundreds of residents packing a public forum last month to question their representatives.
The vacuum didn't work as planned, but Winton pressed on. He questioned whether the new navigation method is necessary, adding that if it is, planners should not consolidate 30 flight tracks into seven.
"One hundred and twenty times per day, you'd have the 70 decibels of a vacuum cleaner going off right over your head," Winton said. "Imagine how that impacts the concentration of a small child. Imagine how that disrupts your ability to enjoy your backyard. IT would simply be unacceptable."
Winton said that the airport should be sending more flights off of an underutilized runway, runway 17, that routes planes over the Minnesota River Valley.
The energy attorney also advocated calculating noise impacts in a simpler way, dumping logarithms in favor of counting the number of times a day a homeowner experiences a certain decibel level.
Among other plans of attack, Winton said he would build "a coalition with the Minnesota congressional delegation to apply pressure to the FAA to say, 'No, you cannot jam this down our throats. It's not right. And if you do, our congressional delegation will work with colleagues of theirs in Congress to start cutting funding to the FAA. Because we're not going to take our tax dollars and pay the FAA to stick it to us.'"
