By Tonya Alanez and Brittany Wallman, Sun Sentinel
DANIA BEACH — The brief period of kumbaya between the city and Broward County after last year's historic airport runway settlement has disintegrated, with city commissioners poised to void the deal Tuesday.
And litigation to delay construction of the $790 million runway likely is not far behind.
"We've been boxed in, we don't have a lot of options here," Commissioner Anne Castro said Friday. "This is not going to fall on the backs of 2,000 middle-class Dania Beach homeowners. Their homes are their whole life savings. This is their slice of heaven and somebody is basically demolishing it."
The proposed settlement crumbled when the Federal Aviation Administration nixed a never-before-done key element: cash payments to homeowners in the high-noise zone.
Under the terms of the "early benefit'' program, 857 homeowners would have been eligible for a payment equal to 20 percent of their home's values if they gave up their rights to sue.
The remaining "sales assistance" program could have some homeowners waiting nearly 40 years for their turn to sell their homes.
"This is a nothing agreement," Bob Mikes, vice president of Dania's airport advisory board, said of the pared down deal. "[Commissioners] have to go back to litigation even if they only get a fraction more than what is left in this agreement. Something is better than nothing."
Mikes, a former city commissioner who lives in the heavily impacted Melaleuca Gardens neighborhood, says plenty of talk is brewing about individual and possible class-action lawsuits.
Broward Aviation Director Kent George predicted that Dania would have no success in impeding the runway's anticipated Sept. 18, 2014, opening.
"We do not feel that they can curtail what we're doing now, and they cannot restrict the opening of the runway,'' he said. "They're not going to sue their way to success.''
In order to void the settlement, commissioners must vote unanimously to do so.
"I don't think this vote is going to be a big surprise," Castro said.
This second "main" landing strip at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport will pave the way for bigger commercial jets and increase the number of take-offs and landings, which could be as many as 503 a day by 2020, said attorney Neil McAliley, hired by the city to negotiate the settlement.
Construction began in January. The runway will be an engineering spectacle, sloping eastward until it's six stories tall, crossing over the FEC railroad tracks and U.S. 1.
Once it's in service, nearly 2,500 Dania residents will be exposed to sound levels deemed incompatible with residential use.
The nixed aspect of the agreement gave homeowners an exit strategy, McAliley said.
But the federal government said it couldn't justify paying for it with money from air commerce. The cost for the county to pick up the tab would be up to $48 million.
"It's not a payoff," McAliley said. "The FAA could have done it. There's nothing in the rules that says they can't. Nobody's done it before, that's the problem. It's a unique, creative thing that nobody's ever done before. It's not that they can't do it, it's just that they choose not to."
In a May 17 letter to the FAA, McAliley said its refusal to fund the payments "reflected a significant misunderstanding of the settlement" and warned that the federal government could be exposing itself to "enormous" litigation costs.
Those costs would be moot, McAliley emphasized, if the federal government made the payments to residents who, in exchange, would sign releases promising not to sue.
Source: http://www.sun-sentinel.com
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