Everett Seeks To Alleviate The Paine Of Driving Home From SeaTac

To Seattlest Everett may be nothing more than a traffic annoyance on the way up to B'ham, but apparently there are a bunch of actual people who live there; working, living, breathing. Flying. To get from SeaTac to Seattle is kind of a pain in the ass. To get from Seattle past Everett is a huge pain in the ass so imagine what it must be like to get from the airport to Everett. That's right, a nightmare too dark to even contemplate. At the rate the light rail line is progressing north it could potentially beat you there if you tried to drive it at rush hour, which is probably why Everett's been making some noise about getting commercial flight into the city recently.

They're talking about landing passenger flights at Paine Field (which Everett is thinking about annexing) and, as you would expect, airlines and the people who love them are in favor of the idea and people whose homes happen to stand in the way aren't thrilled. Journalist Bradley Meacham says on his excellent blog (which seems to have avoided any newspaperly affiliations thus far):

Airline flights at Everett are discouraged by a 1979 agreement with the neighboring communities. Some neighbors still say occasional airline service would be a disaster, causing school test scores to plummet, asthma, pregnancy complications, dropping property values, and an overall lower quality of live. The airport is mainly used by Boeing, which builds 747s and 767s there, Goodrich Aerospace and smaller private planes.