After years of debate, Boise’s Gowen Field will not get F-35A jets in this round of placements.
The Air Force announced Wednesday that Truax Field in Wisconsin and Dannelly Field in Alabama will be the next two locations for those missions, meaning Boise and two other locations that were being considered — one in Florida and one in Michigan — will not be.
The fighter jets make significant noise, and a draft environmental impact statement from the Air Force found that putting the mission at Gowen Field could make hundreds of homes unlivable.
The statement said 272 households with about 665 people would regularly be subjected to noise as loud as a vacuum cleaner 3 feet away. Those people live on 446 acres stretching from Victory Road to South Federal Way and from West Overland Road to land south of the Boise Airport, which adjoins Gowen. Most of the households are between South Orchard and South Owyhee streets.
Owyhee-Harbor Elementary School, located on Pasadena Drive, was named as one place within that acreage where sound would be near 65 decibels at an average point — vacuum-cleaner volume.
The noise would be even louder on 74 acres closest to the airport that house 83 households, estimated to be home to 199 people.
Those residents would be subjected to 74 decibels at an average point in the day, and up to 80. Eighty decibels is as loud as a garbage disposal, and eight hours of exposure could damage hearing. The Air Force statement said such volumes would render those acres “potentially incompatible for residential land use.”
During public testimony on the jets, more than 120 people commented on the mission, with the overwhelming majority saying they were against it.
It was unlikely the mission would come to Boise after the final environmental impact statement, released in February, recommended the locations in Wisconsin and Alabama.
“To protect existing affordable housing, I opposed bringing F-35s to Boise, given the impact that the Environmental Impact Statement suggested it would have, as more than 272 homes would become unsuitable for living and schools in our community would be impacted,” Boise Mayor Lauren McLean said in an emailed statement to the Statesman. “I committed not to use taxpayer dollars to encourage such a mission.”
McLean noted in February that there is an active A-10 mission for the Idaho Air National Guard at Gowen Field, and with recent wing replacements on the A-10 aircraft, “reports indicate that the current mission is expected to continue through 2030.”
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