Video 1 - Tuesday, March 17 2009
Eden Prairie City Council Approves Resolution
to oppose change in reliever status-
Video 2 - Tuesday, March 17 2009
Eden Prairie City Council Adopts Resolution
to oppose change in reliever designation.
Zero Expansion was scheduled to make a short video presentation at the July 15th Council meeting. We canceled our presentation because the city protested our use of their system to show our videos. Why? Because they don't want it in the public realm.
Now the entire nation/ world can view the videos of noise violators at Flying Cloud Airport because they're up at YOUTUBE. The Eden Prairie City Council can't stop the videos from being shown. We heard that all five on the council voted against Zero Expansion showing the video Tuesday night., July 15th.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C89ApPI8qWA |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsdONiOoNws |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ezzy4JsEcw&feature=userJuly 1, 2008 6:11AM approx |
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK6xgbOQ_Qc |
Airport neighbors have been complaining about night time noise for years. We don’t feel it’s a coincidence that the presentation Zero Expansions made in January 2008 to the FCAAC provided the impetus for a recent change in the way MAC will monitor noise in the future. Zero Expansion has argued that noise has not been accurately assessed. At the FCAAC meeting this July, MAC announced that they were going to install a radar system of monitoring which could catch as much as 95% of the noise disturbances. At this same FCAAC meeting it was announced that there were 605 reported disturbances, by residents, in a 2 month time span this year. How many letters went out to those violators? We believe if you don't have a commensurate penalty for the violation, than the numbers of violations will not go down just because you've measured them more accurately. The city needs to find out the ratio of letters to violators, and repeat violators, and than work with MAC to actualize a penalty that will make all this extra paper and leg work unnecessary.
You can find Zero Expansion’s presentation on the inadequacy of the noise monitoring from January 2008 at http://www.zeroexpansion.com/linkpages/complaint-redux.shtml.
The videos we were going to present at the City Council Meeting on Tuesday are a reminder that residents are still impacted on a daily basis by violators of the voluntary curfew. What makes the voluntary curfew unfeasible is the fact that users of the system don’t have to self report their violations; the onus is on the recipients of the noise. No wonder the voluntary system hasn’t worked. Hopefully the radar system will accurately measure the violations.
As to refusing to allow a public viewing of the videos, the city says their in-house technology will be taxed by four other presentations which were scheduled for Tuesday night and our presentation will interfere. We’re not sure whether the Chamber or the MAC would be given that same response. At least we know they would be rescheduled. No such offer was made to Zero Expansion. It's apparent to us that our elected officials want to keep this issue out of the public realm; they have also made it quite clear they have neither the time to give us, nor the interest, nor the will, to continue to address one of the most significant issues in Eden Prairie.
The recent video of aircraft taking off during the voluntary nighttime curfew can also be found at our blog at http://wwwzeroexpansion.blogspot.com/ or on YOUTUBE at the URLs listed above. Groups of airport neighbors have been measuring noise violations during the summer months and discovered frequent abuse of the voluntary curfew between the hours of 5, 6 and 7 AM. The videos show four different flights taking off within minutes of each other from approximately 5:49 AM to around approximately 6:11 AM. We've argued repeatedly that the system of measuring noise and penalizing violators with a letter is not working.