Cloverdale delays renewing lease for skydiving company

The Cloverdale City Council has postponed renewing the lease for a controversial skydiving operation, but not because of persistent noise complaints about its airplanes.

Although critics of NorCal Skydiving would like to see the operation go away, City Council members are focusing on how much they should raise the rent on the company.

“The sentiment is they (City Council members) wanted to get more out of the business at the airport so the impact to the general fund would be less,” Mayor Bob Cox said Friday.

While the City Council is looking to whittle the approximate $30,000 annual deficit the city-owned airport runs and determine what rent to charge, opponents of the skydiving operation would like to see the lease canceled entirely.

“It should be revoked. They have not lived up to several conditions of the lease,” said Jacqueline Kennedy, who lives on Dutcher Creek Road, about 2 miles west of the airport.

Kennedy is one of dozens of area residents who have complained about engine noise from the skydiving planes, which has been described as “deafening,” “like a leaf-blower overhead,” or like “snowmobiles up in the air.”

Some have compared the sound of the planes at takeoff and during their 20-minute crawl circling the valley to that of NASCAR.

Jimmy Halliday, co-owner of the skydiving operation said he has changed flight patterns, pilots and planes to lessen the din, but the complaints persist.

Last month, an attorney versed in aviation law was invited to brief the City Council and community on the issue. He bolstered the view of city officials that there is little they can do about noise complaints.

“We don’t have any control over what happens with an airplane once it’s off the ground. That’s totally FAA (Federal Aviation Administration),” Mayor Cox said.

An FAA spokesman on Friday reiterated that his agency does not regulate noise, although sometimes it will work with pilots, airports and community groups to address noise issues.

At last month’s City Council meeting, aviation expert Henry Nanjo said the FAA sets a high threshold for acceptable noise, much higher than what is found at the Cloverdale Airport, according to the Cloverdale Reveille.

Critics of the skydiving operation, who’ve formed the group Cloverdale Quiet Skies Coalition, want to see the city act as more of a mediator to come up with a noise abatement solution. They say there are days when they don’t hear the aircraft, so they claim it is possible to tone it down.

But Mayor Cox, who is on the city’s airport subcommittee, said that can be due to atmospheric conditions.

“Noise goes which way the wind blows,” he said. “If we had control over the wind that would be lovely.”

He said the skydiving operation has varied its takeoffs and landings and “done a number of things to mitigate the noise issue.”

“From my knowledge and working with Jimmy Halliday, he has done what he can within his capabilities,” Cox said.

But residents like Kennedy say the noise “has almost changed my life in a way. I dread weekends.” She said the aircraft noise from NorCal is so “incredibly loud” sometimes that she will leave the house and go shopping, and has also tried masking the overhead sound with an electric saw to cut hard ceramic tile.

Even with her saw operating, “I can still hear the plane,” she said.

Halliday did not respond to a request for comment Friday, but he previously said NorCal conducts about 4,500 parachute jumps annually.

The company has leased two acres at the airport, including a hangar, since 2009. City staff proposed a lease renewal through mid-2018 that would raise the company’s monthly rent by 7 percent, from the current $1,400 to $1,500. Under the proposal, the monthly rent would increase an additional $100 per month for each of the following two years.

But City Council members appear to want to raise the rent even more and will probably take up the matter again at their May 27 meeting, according to Cox.

“There’s a point at which you raise the rent and you lose the client,” he said. He described it as a situation of “let’s get what (rent) we can, but let’s not go too far.”

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.com.