By Mayor Joseph A. Curtatone

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

When you live in the most densely populated city in New England, you take it for granted that a certain amount of background noise is part of the bargain. Our houses are located closer together than in suburban towns. Residential neighborhoods and commercial centers (or as we like to call them, city squares) are intertwined.  Our streets are heavily trafficked by all sorts of vehicles and pedestrian activity. We’re not Sleepy Hollow.

Yet in 2006 we began to hear a sharp increase throughout the city in one especially intrusive type of noise: the incessant drone of jet aircraft  flying out of Logan airport. Despite a promise from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that use of the its newly-built Runway 14/32 would not change overall runway usage patterns or noise levels over nearby communities,  jet traffic over our city tripled in 2007 to 32,266 departures.

We went from having occasional arrival and departure flyovers to being a regular Logan flight route. Then, this summer, we enjoyed a few months respite from the noise thanks to construction at Logan. Suddenly we remembered what it was like not to have planes constantly buzzing over our city.

Unfortunately the planes are back now and the noise has returned. Now we need to rally our city to make enough noise to get the FAA to honor its commitments.

A quick history lesson, back in 1976 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court approved an injunction that prevented Massport from building the runway which was anticipated would result in more traffic over this area of the Boston region. Then in 1995 Massport sought to restart construction of that runway as part of an overall improvement program for Logan. It was determined that opening the runway would have a significant environmental impact, likely tripling the amount of traffic over this area. In order to reduce the amount of traffic, the FAA promised only to use the runway when windspeeds from the northwest and southeast were more than 10 knots.

The wind restriction was designed to prevent the runway “from changing overall runway utilization patterns at Logan.” The only reason the new runway was allowed to be built was because of the wind restriction and the promise not to change the historical utilization patterns at Logan. When lifting the original injunction against the runway, the state court expressly stated that the new runway should not be used as a “Trojan Horse” designed to shift traffic patterns at the airport.

Yet that is exactly what happened. Massport built the runway and the FAA has drastically shifted Logan traffic patterns to increase the number of flights over Somerville. In 2009, we tried to get the state court to force Massport to honor the wind restriction agreement, but the court declined, stating that the FAA has sole discretion over runway usage.

And the FAA has been completely unresponsive when it comes to addressing this issue.

I suspect the FAA hopes that Somerville will tire of running into dead ends, quietly accepting the overhead noise. The FAA could not be more wrong. During the recent wrangling over the timeline for the Green Line extension I have pointed out that no one ever gave Somerville anything. We had to fight to get everything we have. This issue is no different.

We will try every legal and political avenue available to us. The promises made to this city and our neighbors were broken, and they were broken almost instantly without good faith ever even entering into the equation.

Massport’s noise complaint line is 617-561-3333.  When  jet noise  over Somerville shatters the peace of your neighborhood, call and register a complaint with Massport that includes the location,  date and time of the incident.  You can help us by also reporting the disturbance to 311.  The statistics you provide will be an important weapon is our ongoing campaign.

We also need the people of Somerville to organize and make enough noise that the FAA feels compelled to respond. The drone of jet engines over our city must be diminished and the FAA is going to learn that we will not go away quietly.