No Sleep for Residents Near Santa Barbara Airport
Community Gathers at Goleta Council to Vent on Harms from Aircraft Operations
Residents to either end of the main runway at Santa Barbara Airport haven’t had a decent night’s sleep in two years. They populated a Goleta City Council workshop on Wednesday evening demanding solutions, or at least explanations, for the misery they’ve been enduring living in the City of Goleta near an airport owned and operated by the City of Santa Barbara.
The new airport manager, Chris Hastert, was at least there with his staff to listen and offer some answers. The previous airport manager, Henry Thompson, had been notable by his absence from the public eye during his two years with Santa Barbara before moving on to Fresno in December 2021. Hastert arrived three months ago from managing Santa Maria’s airport, and Oxnard and Camarillo’s before that, all of them encircled by jurisdictions that didn’t have an ownership interest in the airport, he said.
The issues were manifold: the 5:15 a.m. departure time by airlines, the black soot falling on homes, the night-and-day noise of aircraft far and wide, the onetime noise abatement corridors, the complaints system, corporate jets, and a planned airport expansion. Fully 18,000 noise complaints were logged as of October from across the south coast.
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