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Dear Friends,
We have written to Council reiterating our thanks for their leadership regarding the City's appeal of the deeply flawed SFO FEIR at the February 3 San Francisco Board of Supervisors Hearing and to request public outreach. We have not heard any news and sent Council the following this week, in support of continuing the appeal of SFO's flawed FEIR.
SFO should be held to account, CEQA challenged
Date: Mon, Feb 23, 2026 at 3:07 PM
Subject: SFO should be held to account, CEQA challenged
Dear Mayor Veenker, Vice Mayor Stone, Councilmembers Lauing, Burt, Lu, Lythcott-Haims, Reckdahl; City Manager and City Attorney,
We want to express strong support for the City to continue appealing SFO’s untruthful CEQA and feel strongly that an independent review of SFO’s FEIR in Superior Court is necessary. The opportunity for the City to do so appears to end on March 6. We also stand ready to support the City however we can with a court review.
The San Francisco Planning contingent working on denying Palo Alto’s appeal ≃10 who huddled after the SF Board of Supervisors Feb 3 decision to deny Palo Alto’s appeal seemed very satisfied to evade the purpose of CEQA, which is to provide truthful and accurate disclosures of potential impacts. They prevailed based on a highly questionable play of words about baselines while not producing any accounting of the growth in negative impacts integral to the project. What remains is an untruthful and misleading CEQA report, and last minute document additions from SFO (without notice to the public) paving the way for continued misleading declarations from SFO that are especially harmful to Palo Alto.
SFO should be held to account for producing an inadequate and misleading CEQA. We have learned from the past that SFO declarations of "zero impact" and "nothing has changed" are deliberate mischaracterizations of SFO arrival flights that have successively increased their impact over Palo Alto. It does not matter what the name of the change is, OTA, Nextgen, GBAS, or measures that also push the safety envelope, SFO in collaboration with airlines continually undermine “surprise” and deleterious impacts over Palo Alto. If SFO has not reached out or agreed to meet with the City to collaborate on the “reasonable asks of SFO” that we put forth, it will be up to the City to take responsibility for these specific tasks which are necessary to correct the record for the public about potential impacts; inform impending and future FAA actions; establish credible noise abatement programs; and to effectuate the City’s “fast track” policy. Especially in light of impending FAA actions that have not been adequately analyzed and that the public is being kept in the dark about.
We have thus re-titled the “reasonable asks” as Critical and URGENT City Investments to abate air traffic noise and particulate pollution over Palo Alto. IFP Gateway reporting of FAA actions impacting Palo Alto (which should be published for the affected public) and permanent noise monitoring demand a responsible and trusted agency in charge. Noise monitoring is essential to implement the two voluntary night time solutions that were proposed by the FAA during the Select Committee during a discussion on September 1, 2016. The FAA explained to officials and the community how a collaboration between the FAA, airport, and airlines could be effective and the FAA also offered new infrastructure (new flight path design changes) for Palo Alto and MidPen to address nighttime impacts. We underscore (and the FAA agreed on the record) this means dedicated night time programs for MidPen and Palo Alto, not stepchild treatment via the SFO Roundtable and San Mateo. We would hope that a court should also be interested in knowing why an airport refuses to engage our City on night time noise abatement programs that already a decade ago were recommended by the FAA and with regional consensus. Measuring progress can only be done with action and results on these investments.
Last week we sent a reminder that there were only two Council meetings left for Council to convene on this very important decision.
PLEASE DO NOT LET SFO OFF THE HOOK FROM THEIR ABUSE OF CEQA.
Thank you,
Sky Posse Palo Alto
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