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San Jose officials put off a vote Tuesday that would allow taller downtown buildings in a bid to boost development amid concerns about aircraft safety and the viability of cross-country and international flight service at the city’s airport.
“This is still too complex for me to feel comfortable making a decision,” Vice Mayor Chappie Jones said at an agenda-setting meeting last week. “The decision we’re going to make is going to impact the city for the next 100 years. I just don’t want to have a situation where we don’t know what we don’t know.”
Mayor Sam Liccardo agreed to put off a vote but was frustrated over the delay on an issue the city has been hashing out for a decade and a half.
“I think it’s important for us to move forward,” Liccardo said at that meeting. “My concern is that deferring and deferring and deferring because some people have questions — which may be very reasonable questions to raise — unfortunately never gets us to the finish line.”
Federal Aviation Administration guidelines meant to protect airspace around airports to ensure planes have room to take off and land safely even if they lose power in an engine from, say, striking a bird, have effectively capped the skyline in San Jose. Mineta San Jose International Airport is less than four miles from downtown, where incoming planes fly low enough that passengers’ heads in the windows can be seen from the street.
The city considered relaxing height restrictions in 2007, but backed off, Liccardo said, because a major airline was opposed. But conversations continued, he said, and since then, that airline and others as well as airport officials have grown comfortable that buildings can be taller without hurting air safety or airport service.
The City Council was set to vote on allowing buildings to be anywhere from 5 to 35 feet taller in the downtown core and anywhere from 70 to 150 feet taller around Diridon Station, San Jose’s downtown train station. The city’s Office of Economic Development argues the new development it would allow would bring millions of dollars more in tax dollars each year and new vibrancy to a city long known for its sprawl.
But the city’s 10-member Airport Commission disagrees, arguing taller buildings would require planes in some conditions to carry less fuel, cargo and passengers to fly in and out safely. Longterm, they said that would hurt San Jose’s ability to attract and keep direct flights to Europe, Asia and the East Coast.
“In my opinion, the only winners in this current situation are downtown developers,” Airport Commission Chairman Dan Connolly said Tuesday. “The airport will suffer from this, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see airlines just stop flying routes.”
Commissioners were resistant to any change in the height limits, Connolly said, but came up with a compromise that would allow taller buildings around Diridon but not downtown. Google is buying up property near the station for its plans to build a downtown campus for up to 20,000 employees.
Commissioner Raymond Greenlee, a longtime pilot for a major airline who has flown in and out of San Jose, said Tuesday there have been no technological developments in recent years that would alleviate danger from tall buildings in the airport flight path.
“It was already an obstacle out there,” Greenlee said. “It only takes a couple mistakes here and there and all of a sudden you have catastrophe on your hands.”
He added that as a professional pilot “I do know more than our mayor knows when it comes to this — it’s a reduction in safety and it hinders the viability of our airport long-term.”
An email from a Hawaiian Airlines manager, commissioners said, suggests at least one airline isn’t comfortable with the looser height limits the city is proposing. Flight Operations Manager Kalani Sloat said in the Feb. 20 email to Airport Director John Aitken that the proposal city officials are favoring is “the second least acceptable” and “impacts our cargo capacity in every market out of SJC in the summer.” He did not respond to a request for comment.
Liccardo said Tuesday, however, that the email “is no different from what Hawaiian has been telling our staff all along.” He added that airline, airport and FAA officials who have been debating this issue for years have concluded that the “very modest reductions” in aircraft operations that would result from the relaxed height limits are safe and manageable.
“We’ve got a lot of very competent people working hard on this,” Liccardo said. “I think we have to at least recognize they understand how to run their airlines, the FAA understands how to run the FAA and our airport has a pretty good idea how to run the airport.
“Everybody is absolutely convinced no flight is going to take off if it’s unsafe.”
