Note: The proposed basing of new F35 fighter jets at the Burlington, VT airport has been extremely controversial and hotly contested as many have uncovered the vast range of health, social and environmental impacts these earsplittingly loud and polluting jets will have on the surrounding community.
I used to live 9 miles from the Burlington airport, on the other side of some tall hills. Every night from inside my home I heard the F15 fighter jets taking off. The awful noise from those old jets is apparently nothing compared to the new ones. Yet the entire Vermont Congressional delegation–Patrick Leahy, Bernie Sanders and Peter Welch–plus the Governor–all support this new horror. So much for Vermont’s “quality of life.”
–Anne Petermann for the GJEP Team
By Thia Sands, October 30, 2013
On Monday night two resolutions to ban F35 military jets from being based at the Burlington airport were defeated by the Burlington (VT) City Council. My family and I were there. The hall was filled to capacity on two levels. We were in the balcony.
Some 350 Guard members and their supporters, many bused in by the military, arrived more than an hour before the meeting and filled the level where the Council sat, and where the public had to approach the microphone, and also some of the seats upstairs. They signed up their people to speak.
New rules were then announced by the Council President as the meeting began. Burlington residents who had never before voiced an opinion on the issue to the Council would speak first. Participants had been sorted accordingly, and all of the F35 basing opponents who had spoken in the past were sidelined. For the two hours we were there, we heard from members of the Guard about why the public was indebted to their “service,” and about how the economy of the airport was dependent on them, and how a vote against the F35 was a vote against their families and all they had done for us.
