Jane MusgraveFive times more homes are affected by jet noise after Secret Service ordered all flights to go north to avoid President Trump’s home.
While Palm Beach County commissioners on Friday filed suit against the federal government to challenge new rules that block aircraft from flying over President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, it won’t provide quick relief for the more than 20,000 county residents whose lives have been upended.
It will take at least a year to resolve the suit that only four of the seven commissioners supported, said attorney Steven Osit, who represents the county on aviation issues.
Officials also said there is little chance that political pressure will spur the U.S. Secret Service to rescind its October order that keeps aircraft away from Mar-a-Lago even when Trump isn’t at his private club, which is directly east of Palm Beach International Airport.
U.S. Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, is to meet privately with agency officials in Washington on Dec. 18 to question their reasoning. But, her aide, Felicia Goldstein, cautioned residents of historic neighborhoods in West Palm Beach and Palm Beach not to get their hopes up.
“The Secret Service can pretty much do anything they want when it comes to the safety of the president,” Goldstein on Thursday told about 30 residents who gathered — again — to ask county leaders to do something about the switch that they said is destroying their sleep, mental health and property values.
“It’s very disrupting to our lives in a real way,” said Raphael Clemente, who lives in the historic Flamingo Park neighborhood in West Palm Beach. “This is a disruptive and unnerving change.”
Nancy Pullum, chair of the county’s Citizens’ Committee on Airport Noise, told Clemente that she sympathizes with him and others who complained about jets rattling their homes.
On Sunday alone, 384 jets flew over the 11,000 homes where 21,000 people live, airport officials said. Under decades-old flight rules, which Trump fought vigorously before he was elected president in 2016, air traffic affected 2,200 homes where 5,000 people live.
Further, before the new restrictions, jets were allowed to fan both north and south when Trump was at Mar-a-Lago. Now, jets are only allowed to head north whether Trump is in town or not.
Like others, Pullum said there is no quick fix. “This is not something we’re going to solve overnight or it would have already been done,” she said.
Pullum and other committee members said that the outlook would have been worse if County Commissioner Gregg Weiss hadn’t persuaded three other commissioners, all Democrats, to challenge the Secret Service’s edict, which was adopted by the Federal Aviation Administration. The suit is known as a “petition for review.”
Time was running out. The commission had 60 days to challenge the FAA’s October order. If the commission didn’t file the petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., by Friday, it would have lost its chance to do so, said incoming County Attorney David Ottey.
Lawsuit splits County Commission along party lines
To bolster the county’s claims, Palm Beach filed a separate petition, said Lew Crampton, a Town Council member who is also a member of the noise committee. The city of West Palm Beach joined the town’s lawsuit.
County Mayor Sara Baxter and Commissioners Marci Woodward and Maria Marino, all Republicans, voted against taking legal action. Commissioners Maria Sachs, Bobby Powell and Joel Flores joined Weiss, a fellow Democrat, in supporting the challenge to the Republican administration.
Both Baxter and Woodward said they trusted that the action by the federal agencies was justified.
“I do not believe the FAA or the Secret Service would be asking for this if they didn’t have good reason to do so,” Baxter said. “We’re just not privy to it.”
Ottey said both agencies have refused to meet with county officials. As part of the lawsuit, they could decide to do so.
Marino said she voted against filing the petition because by the time it is resolved the new flight rules could be lifted.
Attorneys warned that the new restrictions could be extended. If the commission didn’t file suit by Friday, it would forever lose its ability to challenge them, Osit said.
Sachs said there was no downside to filing the lawsuit.
“Why would we not want to do this just to preserve our rights?” she asked. “We are not jeopardizing the county government’s rights. We are preserving our rights and forcing the FAA to give us the information we need.”
The lawsuit could push federal officials to the negotiating table, Ottey said. Rather than litigate, they might opt to work out a compromise.
Fear residents will sue county
Weiss, who lives in Flamingo Park, said he worried that if the commission didn’t challenge the decision, the county could be forced to pay.
Upset residents could go to court, claiming jet noise destroyed their property values and quality of life. Because the county owns the airport, it would be sued, Osit said.
Like Weiss, Flores said the commission had to protect its residents.
“I don’t think anyone here on this board is debating keeping our president safe. I think that’s paramount,” Flores said. “But this shouldn’t be permanent. This shouldn’t be when he’s not here. We have taken on that burden when he is here and we are happy to do so. But only when he’s here. When he’s not here, I don’t think our residents deserve to carry that burden.”
Those who addressed the noise committee said they fear Trump will seek to make the restrictions permanent. Flight restrictions have remained in place after other presidents left office. They remained over the Texas ranch and Maine home of President George W. Bush.
David Skok, who lives along the Intracoastal Waterway in Palm Beach, described the noise over his once quiet street as “horrendous.”
Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985 for a bargain $10 million because, Skok said, it was in the flight path, although its sky-high maintenance costs had turned it into a white elephant. Trump then spent years suing the county to stop planes from flying over the home that was built in the 1920s for businesswoman and socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post.
“This was a pretty unfriendly act here,” Skok said. “It may be an attempt to make it a permanent fixture to the value of Trump’s property and to the detriment of the town and many, many other people around him.”
Carol Roberts, a member of the noise committee who served as a Democrat on the County Commission when it battled Trump over airport noise, agreed.
“We need to do whatever we can do to prevent it from becoming permanent,” she said. “I do think that’s what he wants to do.”
FAA doesn’t consider ground-based noise monitors
What the noise committee can do is unclear. At a November meeting, members said they wanted to develop recommendations to send to county commissioners about measures that could reduce the impact of the new flight rules.
More flights could be directed to fly out to the west when wind permits, Pullum suggested. Or, perhaps, commercial flights could be required to accelerate more rapidly on takeoff so they would be higher, and therefore less disruptive, when they went over homes.
On Thursday, the committee briefly discussed where to install 10 new noise monitors that are to replace seven that stopped working. A detailed discussion is to be held on Jan. 22.
But, the noise monitors aren’t used by the FAA to determine if noise levels exceed 65 decibels, its threshold to determine if an airport impacts residential areas.
Clemente, in a recording played for the committee, showed that the noise from jets over his home exceeded 80 decibels.
Instead of using ground-based monitors, the FAA uses its own models to determine noise levels and then averages them using a 24-hour day-night calculation where extra penalties are given for jet noise between 10 pm and 7 am.
The ground-based noise monitors are used by the committee to give the public information about the impact of jets flying over homes.
Committee members said residents can help them by filing complaints and explaining how the rule change has impacted their lives. They urged them to write letters to the FAA and congressional representatives, and call the airport’s noise complaint line at 561-244-9510.
“We’re in it to win it,” said Crampton. “We’re here to make a record. We need real data. The more people who call the noise line or file a complaint, the better.”
Weiss said it appears the FAA didn’t follow its own rules before changing the flight rules. It didn’t conduct an environmental impact study or take other required steps
That, he told the committee, is why the commission was forced to go to court.
“We’re mostly hopeful that it brings everyone together to the table and we can have a discussion and find out why they’re doing this, why they made the changes while President Trump is not in residence,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. We want to get to that, understand what that is and then understand what mitigations might be available to use.”
Click here to watch the Citizens’ Committee Dec. 11 meeting.
Click here to see County Commission Dec. 9 discussion (at 39-minute mark).
Read the county’s petition here.
Editor’s note: This story was updated Dec. 15 to add information about West Palm Beach joining Palm Beach’s petition and to delete incorrect information reported by WPTV Channel 5 that the flight restrictions had been extended until Dec. 10, 2026. Gary Sypek, senior deputy director of airports, said the station misinterpreted a letter from the FAA on a different matter.
