When Louisville International Airport opened the first of two new parallel runways four years ago, residents of this town 5 miles away were offered a chance to escape the new waves of noise.
They were invited, along with other nearby residents, into one of the country’s most ambitious relocation efforts to alleviate airplane noise: a $285 million program of state and federal grants to buy out 3,760 property owners so they could purchase houses in quieter neighborhoods.
But as the 1,700 residents of Minor Lane Heights considered their options, they made a demand so unusual that Federal Aviation Administration officials now say it could be a model for other communities caught in the noisy path of progress.
Rather than break up lifelong friends and neighbors, officials here told the airport authorities that Minor Lane Heights residents would agree to move together.
That meant the 552 households, the nine-member police department, Mayor Fred Williams’ red maintenance truck, even the Weenie Wagon the town purchased to sell hot dogs at picnics.
“We’ve never encountered this big a deal, a community making a decision to move this way,” said Stan Lou, an FAA official.
Noise is the challenge for the aviation agency. Each year, it spends millions to ease the exposure of residents near airports to jet-engine roar. The 1998 budget for the program was $200 million, up 28 percent from 1995. In some places, the money is used to sound-proof houses. In others, houses are bought and razed.
Tests in Minor Lane Heights showed that sound-proofing would have been inadequate. To honor the residents’ request to stay together, the aviation agency set up a program with a $10 million grant, which the airport matched, for a new site for the city.
This let the airport to buy 287 acres of farmland 10 miles southeast of here and hire five home builders. By fall, the first 50 families are scheduled to move. More homes are planned.
The community will not be limited to Minor Lane Heights residents.
“For a lot of people, noise wasn’t the biggest problem,” said Carole Cantrall, a City Council member credited with proposing the idea to keep the city together. “The major problem was living in limbo, losing their house and losing their neighbors. Now, they’re thrilled. They get to keep everything important to them, plus they have a new home.”
In general, the houses here are about 1,000 square feet, with three bedrooms and one bath, and Williams said they would sell for $50,000 to $60,000 if airplane noise were not an issue.
The relocation program has agreed to buy each house and sell the owner a lot at Heritage Creek. The owner can use the rest of the money from the buyout to purchase a house at the new site, where most of them will have at least three bedrooms, two baths and a larger lot.
The airport, which needed the runways to accommodate the growing United Parcel Service fleet based in Louisville, plans to recoup some of its investment by razing the abandoned town and reselling land to businesses that need to be near the airport.
Some residents of Minor Lane Heights have taken buyouts and moved. But many more of the residents are awaiting construction of their houses. In the small house that serves as City Hall, site plans for each section of Heritage Creek sit on easels, and for the last month or so, residents have stopped in to pick out lots.
Some, like David Weedman, 34, a truck driver, and three of his neighbors have selected lots in almost the same relation to where they live now.
Others, including Jane Wilkerson, a City Council member, have made plans for much bigger houses.
“I’m going to have a deck, a 2 1/2-car garage and a fenced yard,” Wilkerson said, naming amenities that the house she has lived in since 1963 lacks.
Not all the residents of Minor Lane Heights or the families living near Heritage Creek are so excited. James Roeder, 24, a plumber who lives here with his mother, said they were not moving to Heritage Creek. Roeder said his mother would move in with her ailing 74-year-old mother, who lives outside of the area affected by noise. Roeder intends to move to Alabama.
“For my Mom, this had been a real hardship,” he said. “She is hating this. But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
Rev. David Price, pastor of the Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Church, has lived here for 13 years, presiding over a congregation of about 40 families. Price and his wife expect to move to Heritage Creek by 2001, but only if he can find a way to move the church, too. If he cannot, he might move elsewhere.
“Everybody I talk to is going,” he said. “I’d just as soon stay. But we’d be foolish not to move. What would we do for police protection? What about vandalism? It leaves you open for too many things.”
People near the new community also have concerns. Some have hired lawyers to investigate ways to stop the move, fearing that their rural ways would be changed with traffic and noise.
“The traffic alone is going to be an astronomical problem,” said Richard Vreeland, a real estate agent who lives beside Heritage Creek on a two-lane road, the widest in the area. “Having them here is going to mean no more deer, no more wildlife, no more peacefulness.”
But efforts to halt construction have all but stopped. Ground-breaking ceremonies for the model homes were held in March, and Colleen McKinley, a Louisville lawyer representing the resistance group, said her clients had determined they could not match the relocation program’s financial resources in a legal challenge.
Once Jefferson County approved sewer lines for the new community, “that was the final blow. It was inevitable,” said McKinley.
Williams dismissed objections from his future neighbors, saying, “There’s just a few snooty people out there.”
Standing in fields that will soon sprout houses, he said: “Look at this place. Isn’t it beautiful?”
A plane flew high overhead. It passed by in silence.
