Santa Monica Councilmember Terry O’Day on Tuesday directed City staff to prepare an ordinance and leasing standards that would limit allowable emissions of air pollutants from aircraft and other sources at Santa Monica Airport (SMO).
“I’d like to offer a motion that we direct staff to, not regulate, but to consider strategies as an operator to reduce air pollution from our airport,” O’Day said. “We don’t want to attempt to cross over our authority in this matter, but we do want to try to take actions that we can as operator of the air port.”
The members of the public to address Council agreed and thanked O’Day for presenting it to staff for further drafting.
“I’ll point out – I think it was five years ago – we had to close the runway for a few days to do some repaving and we asked the air quality management district to do some air quality studies,” said Mayor McKeown.
“We found during the few days that the runway was shut down that particulate matter in the immediate vicinity was reduce by a factor of 12 to 17 times. So a very demonstrable impact of on-going aircraft operations that we can go forward with.”
