Butte noise debate takes another lap

WASILLA — Mitzi Van Asdlan doesn’t need advertising to tell her when the nearby Alaska Raceway Park opens.

Instead, Van Asdlan simply waits for the racket to start.

Van Asdlan lives across Sullivan Road from the raceway, and says the June 4 opening of a new oval racetrack has changed the character and volume of the noises that pour across the road toward her property. Van Asdlan has long been accustomed to — and bothered by — the short staccato bursts of the drag strip.

However, the raceway racket has a new sustained dimension, Van Asdlan said.

“It’s much louder than the normal noise coming from the raceway,” she said. “It’s more constant than the drag strip.”

Van Asdlan keeps a digital sound monitor on her property to track levels coming from the raceway. Van Asdlan says she’s recorded sound levels as high as 112 decibels just for the drags. A July 2014 a Mat-Su Borough sound monitoring exercise recorded sound levels as high as 101 decibels for the raceway’s Nitro car, the loudest sound recorded. Those levels are on par with the inside of a dance club, according to a sound comparison chart provided by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA recommends hearing protection for eight hours of exposure to sounds at 85 decibels and above. The National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety recommends exposures of less than 15 minutes per day for sound levels equal to or greater than 100 decibels.

The oval routinely produces sustained sound levels at about 95 decibels, with spikes at about 112 decibels, according to Van Asdlan’s informal sound monitoring. That’s loud enough to be a nuisance, Van Asdlan says.

“You have to come over to my deck here and try to have a normal conversation, or a meal, or watch television in the house,” she said.

“There’s no weekend I could have a picnic out here, or have a party,” she said.

Earl Lackey owns and operates the raceway, and says he hasn’t heard anything at all. At least, not from his neighbors.

“To be honest, I have not heard anybody complain about it,” he said. “I’ve not received any calls.”

Lackey bought the raceway in 2000, but the track itself is 52 years old, about as old as the borough. Regulations limit the hours of operation to between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., and Lackey says he limits cars on the oval track to 95 decibels as a gesture of good will. The track is surrounded by a four-foot high wall has and other noise abatement measures, Lackey said, and is a quarter mile from the property line in any direction.

Complaints about the noise are perennial, Lackey said. The track also serves as an economic stimulant by hiring between 35 and 50 seasonal employees and drawing hundreds of visitors to the area each summer.

“Typically what we see is there are a few folks that don’t like it that are opposed to the race track,” he said.

The racetrack isn’t the only source of loud noises in the Butte, Lackey said. He points to float planes, shooting at Jim Creek, and frequent ATV use as other sources with a similar impact

“Those are all noisy things in this part of the world,” he said.

In general, Lackey tries to keep the track racket as low as possible.

“We try to be good neighbors as much as we possibly can,” he said.

Concerns about noise have led some Butte residents to take action. Cathy Hummel — a frequent critic of borough land use policy in the Butte — has circulated a petition asking for borough employees to monitor and record the “levels, frequency and duration” of sound for properties within a one-mile radius, and then inform property owners in writing of the effects of the exposure.

Hummel says she doesn’t oppose racing in general, but only the specific side effect of this racing. She also worries about the health of people subjected to the noise.

“I think most of the people that are within a half a mile radius are being exposed to levels that you could say are regulated in other arenas,” she said.

Borough officials say the track’s age exempt it from regulations adopted much later in the borough’s history (the earliest such legislation still on the books dates to the 1980s). That puts the track into a distinct category of regulation for nonconforming uses, said borough development services director Alex Strawn. The raceway also had plans to build an oval track on file when the raceway ordinances were adopted in 2014, meaning borough officials could not have stopped the expansion. The only general noise ordinance currently on the books is for amplified noises, meaning sounds that come out of a loudspeaker.

“In the borough, generators, chainsaws, vehicles, none of that is subject to noise regulations,” he said.

Like Van Asdlan, Hummel said she’s given up hope that the petition will make any difference for Butte residents’ ears, or for her dogs, who sometimes panic at the loud race track noises. Officials could do more to help local residents adjust, but probably won’t, Hummel said.

“Ask the borough to come over and enforce their ordinances,” she said. “They’re not going to apply them to the race track, because why should they? It’s just a couple hundred people.”

Contact reporter Brian O’Connor at 352-2270, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.