The revived proposal to expand the perimeter of Harvey Field airport and relocate its main runway into part of the floodplain of Hanson Slough faces renewed opposition.
Airport owners say this is to suit the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) compliance requirements to remove obstructions for pilots, such as the perimeter fence at Airport Way.
Neighbors say there are flood risks posed by altering the balance of the floodplain, and are concerned by disruptions of relocating the road alongside the airport south.
Harvey Field itself intends to construct a new road at its expense and deed it to the county to become the “new” Airport Way, a commissioned environmental report says. Its route would connect at the intersection of Springhetti Road. The family bought the land the road would be placed on.
Work could start as soon as 2026.
An open house on the environmental plan was held last week. Forty-four people signed in as attendees.
Comments are being taken until Friday, May 24. They can be sent to airport manager Cynthia Hendrickson at cyndyh@harveyfield.com or by mail to Ms. Cynthia Hendrickson, Airport Manager, 9900 Airport Way, Snohomish, Washington, 98296.
The roadway would be raised, but engineers working for the airport haven’t identified by how much. This is because the elevation of the roadway is at design stage, Nick Gentile, a water resources engineer for RS&H said.
Raising the roadway concerns a lot of neighbors along 111th Street SE between the slough and river
Nathan Lovelace would have the “new” Airport Way abutting his property.
“All the water’s gotta go somewhere,” Lovelace said, and if the road is raised, he’s worried it’s “going to get trapped and blocked where we are” and then push out to Highway 9.
The Marshland Flood Control District broadly opposes.
They can make dikes stronger but not taller.
“It’s worse for us and worse for our neighbors,” said farmer and diking district commissioner Don Bailey.
When the dike blew in 1990, there was 2½ feet of river water that instantly filled the area, resident Don Satko remembers. 1975 and 2006 also had tremendous floods.
“It’s a tender balance out there,” Satko said.
The diking district spent half a million dollars last year on the levee, and plans to spend $1.26 million in dike maintenance this summer, Marshland’s attorney Gary Brandstetter said.
The airport’s plan lowers the runway’s elevation for the sake of meeting the mathematics of filling dirt one place and cutting another to meet the county’s density fringe allowances.
The engineers are not including the dirt fill to build the roadway toward their cut-fill calculations to meet county density fringe requirements, Gentile said. He said the road is exempted because it is seen as a separate county project for these calculations.
Satko and Pat Philips, who live south of the airport, came away from last week’s meeting disappointed.
Exact details on the drainage plan and flooding weren’t available, Satko said. They want to know they’ll be safe from flooding.
“You’d think they’d have some specifics,” Satko said. “You’d think they’d know the totals to know if the systems are adequate because Hanson Slough fills up.”
Hanson Slough usually flows to the west, Satko said.
Gentile said formal models will be prepared for the final environmental report.
Tyson Harvey, the owner of Skydive Snohomish, said they’re not trying to harm anyone. “We live here — seven generations,” he said.
“We have heard so much much misinformation” about the plan, he said, such as hearing this is to allow larger planes.
The biggest planes allowed are Cessna Caravans and similar turboprops. The future proposed runway length at 2,400 feet can’t accommodate larger planes than that, and the current environmental assessment shows the site plan can’t allow a larger runway because of density fringe. “You’re limited,” Alex Philipson, an environmental specialist for RS&H, said.
Harvey Field is hemmed in between the railroad tracks and a perimeter fence at Airport Way. These above-ground obstructions for pilots is one of the two reasons the runway does not meet FAA standards. The other is that the runway is too narrow.
On a diagram, Tyson Harvey points to the fence at the end of the runway. “Anybody can see this is a bad idea,” he said of the fence.
The FAA did not respond by press time on whether this compliance affects if Harvey Field can obtain grants.
The changes at Paine Field to add commercial caused more general aviation to go to airports such as Harvey Field. “They need airports like this,” Tyson Harvey said.
The potential impacts, both perceived and real, are underpinning why expansion is controversial.
Snohomish resident Candace McKenna and many others fought an expansion proposal in 2006.
The difference McKenna sees is this time the airport is lowering the runway land to meet the county’s revised density fringe requirements.
Lovelace’s house along 111th is right in the flight path. The future road would go up to his property.
He said it would destroy the quiet life he and his wife put together. “It would break my heart if disrupted,” Lovelace said. But at the end of the day, the expansion’s about money, he said.
They support the Harveys as neighbors, but “it comes to a point where they have to look out for us,” Lovelace said.
Harvey Field is one of the few privately owned airports open to the public in the state, and has about 161 planes based there in its hangers as of 2021.
The FAA designates Harvey as a reliever airport, a sort of general aviation airport to relieve small plane traffic congestion away from the commercial service airports.
The number of certified private airplane pilots in Washington state has nearly doubled from 2018 to 2023, FAA annual data shows. It’s gone from 5,985 in 2018 to 10,335 in 2023.
Many more with full commercial licenses also enjoy flying private planes, said Brad Schuster, the area’s Regional Manager of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA).
The idea of Harvey Field expanding in the floodplain has been “a sore subject for a lot of decades,” Satko said. “It would transform our community quite a bit.”
