Comments by District 6 Commissioner JUDY YATES made at Commission meeting on April 9, 2002

“The other thing that I wanted to raise--I’m getting also lots of calls from people around Drew Valley and Chamblee and Briarcliff Woods--all around Peachtree-DeKalb Airport--and they have been calling my attention for about six months to the frequency and size of airplanes that are going into the airport, and, sure enough, when I’m up there at the airport, I see planes unlike any I’ve ever seen before, and what I mean by that is-- just unlike in frequency of landing and in size—these planes are huge.

As I understand it, the previous CEO [Liane Levetan] issued a blanket waiver of our weight limits.  The Board of Commissioners has adopted an ordinance that sets a weight limit on airplanes that land, and there can be a waiver.  As I think the Board intended it, it was a waiver, a one-time waiver for an emergency situation, but the ordinance isn’t very clear how a waiver is granted and for how long or under what circumstances.

So the previous CEO issued a blanket waiver, but the problem that I see with that blanket waiver [is] two things--one, we have an ordinance that says 75,000 pounds, and I don’t believe that that ordinance can just be waived by executive action--the second though is that we also have a court order--a court opinion that was rendered a number of years ago--and the court opinion was based on the 66,000 pound weight limit. 

So I would like to get to the bottom of this and decide what kind of weight limits we’re going to have at the airport--I think we should be upholding the ones that we have already.  What’s going to happen at the airport is that we’re going to end up tearing up our runway with these increased weight limits. 

We are increasing the frequency of use and noise.  A citizen complained to me that it is now a “war zone”--was the word he used “war zone”--in Drew Valley at night because of the noise of the airplanes landing, and I think that we need to do something for our citizens here. 

You know, we’re trying to have good quality of life all over the county, and any time we have industrial uses that abut residential properties, we have problems.  We’re having problems from noise from Hartsfield, of course, but that’s out of our control.  We’ve had problems with granite mining companies in Lithonia and the amount of noise that they generate when they mine granite and do the blasting.  We have problems with the landfills in South DeKalb, and the noise of the trucks and the odors from the landfills and we also have noise from Peachtree-DeKalb Airport.

All of these are industrial uses, and I think that you can understand that industrial use is not a desirable use when there are a number of citizens that live around the industry.  Industry is needed from an economic standpoint, and we need to have our planning and decide how we’re going to buffer industry. I’m not saying that we need to get rid of any of those industries, but we do need to know how we’re going to control them, so they don’t impact residents.  So, I would like for us to look at the Peachtree-DeKalb weight problem--airplane weight problem. 

We are working right now on the landfills.  I’m researching the landfills in South DeKalb to find out when they were legalized, what made them legal, how were they allowed to grow, and, especially, how were they granted expansion when they were non-conforming--legal non-conforming--uses.  And that’s under our zoning ordinance where they were made legal--non-conforming uses. 

So we have things that we need to be doing here to help our citizens so that they will want to stay in DeKalb County and property values will remain high.  Thank you.”