Ep #30: (NTP?)

On May 22, 2026 the Sustainable Airport Master Plan DEIS was released and a sixty day public comment period began. Our fifth3 minute explainer on how you can help your community by being patient and providing high quality comments.  It is not click bait to say: It's easier than you think. It's not what you think. In Ep #29, we said that there was plenty of time to prepare your comments. The most immediate task is to get your local governments to start treating this as an ongoing effort rather than waiting the 11th hour all the time. Many people ask us what 'NTP' means. It's 'near-term projects'. An airport can never shut down to perform upgrades. It needs to keep upgrading while the plane (all the planes) are in the air. People see the construction and think it's being done piecemeal just to work around that challenge. But these projects are planned and sequenced as much according to permitting as anything else. If you can break the work into pieces, you can avoid a ton of regulatory  oversight. In fact, the plan the Port calls the sustainable airport master plan took shape in 2012 as the Century Agenda. **Since then and at least four billion dollars in construction projects have been completed which are *really* part of the plan but not required to be permitted together.** What they call 'the SAMP' was created in 2015, and then immediately broken into two pieces: Near Term Projects and Long Term Projects (LTP.) The LTP is known, but it is almost never spoken of now, and then only as 'unforeseen'. It's completely foreseen. It is intentionally talked about that way because FAA regulations only require a 5-year window on 'foreseeable projects'. We're now in the NTP phase. Everything you think of as 'the SAMP' is really just the Near-Term Projects phase. But whether or not you remember that SAMP == NTP, you can be certain that the LTP is real and it will begin as soon as the NTP closes. How can we be so sure? Because that is what happened after the Third Runway. That is how all major airports work. The construction never ends. Projects are intentionally broken into segments in order to avoid considering cumulative impacts. If you only have to review impacts within foreseeable 5 year windows, you can never be held accountable.