Congressman Honda Exiting Congress

Post date: Nov 10, 2016 7:46:36 PM

Many thanks to Congressman Honda for his support to people in his district. For a while, I think he is not able to do anything on the noise issue...

Following are the questions that we wanted his office to confirm, but they are now open end, I am releasing it anyway so that people may find some insights.

Hi Mason and Anna,

Thank you very much for the time discussing the Sunnyvale noise issue with us, we do appreciate your understanding and the hard work to push this forward.

Back from the meeting encouraged in our current endeavor to stop the sky noise (many thanks to you, Anna and of course Congressman Honda), I want to write up a summary for our meeting, and this will need some clarifications from you.

Below is a recap of the specific help that we would like you to provide, and to which you have kindly accepted during the meeting.

1) We need to receive a confirmation from SJC/FAA that whether the increased noise is a result of the NextGen implementation at SJC. The Sunnyvale website has mentioned NextGen as a cause. But from our discussion today, it occured to me that you do not believe the change has been brought with NextGen. So we would like an official acknowledge from SJC/FAA, to confirm with a definite Yes/No response. Additionally can you help ask SJC to clarify what’s the status of NextGen implementation at SJC?

2) You agreed to help establish a communication channel between the affected residents community and the SJC/FAA representatives. With a good communication between the two sides, things like problem above should be a resolved non-issue long time ago. So we are in need of a two way communication mechanism. And hopefully, you can help us to establish it.

3) Noise monitoring system. In the meeting, you mentioned that due to the lack of fund issue from FAA, there is no aircraft noise monitoring system built for Sunnyvale. Now we can see it’s greatly needed. Please contact FAA to advocate setting up a noise monitoring system in Sunnyvale, so that any evaluation of the aviation plans will be based on real scientific data instead of the count of complaints filed by residents.

4) You mentioned that our Mayor, Mr. Glen Hendrick has access to the SJC's historical flight data. So we should be able to get it from Mr. Hendrick, can you please confirm this?

5) You mentioned that the residents' petition to Congressman Michael Honda has to be submitted to the office to get any response back. Thank you for the reminder, we will make sure this step is taken.

6) You also mentioned that Surf Air (San Carlos Airport) issue has been taken a totally different route, and you are going to send us some information about it. Please do so, for it's very important to Sunnyvale residents now.

And in preparation of this meeting, our group (http://SaveMySunnySky.org ) has collected the following questions from over 500 concerned residents. They are organized by topics, you have answered some of them, but due to the time limit, we haven't discussed them all. I am copying them below, so that you have more understanding what is confusing us, and what is our concerned now. If you can go through them and answer all of those questions, that would be great!

Looking forward to hearing back from you soon!

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And the reply from him is as below:

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Thank you for following up with me, and for also coming into our office earlier last week.

As you may have heard, the Congressman will be exiting Congress soon, and as such, our office will also be closing. In order to ensure you and your community can get the answers to the questions below, I recommend you relay all of these concerns to U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein as she is your other Federal representative. As this issue continues, I also encourage you to engage in discussions with soon to be Representative Ro Khanna.

Our office is currently in the process of closing so we need to dedicate time and resources to complete that process. I thank you for understanding this, and I wish you the best of success in your future endeavors.