The skies over Hillsboro, Oregon, are up for sale, and 7 massive new hangars at the Hillsboro Airport are about to become home for 30-40 private jets that are buying their way into our airspace, lives, and community. This Tuesday night, the Hillsboro City Council will take action on how to proceed with two land-use appeals brought by some of our bravest local residents. Read up and stand with them as these legal cases move forward!
ju-ris-dic-tion
“the official power to make legal decisions and judgments.”
Ladies and gentlemen, that word is the whole ballgame here. Keep it in your pocket as you read.
Back in April, the Herald broke a story about a project almost nobody in this town knew was happening: a $38 million private jet hangar campus, quietly working its way toward approval at Hillsboro Airport. Luxury aircraft. Built for people who will never spend one night under the flight path they’re about to create over your house.
That story woke people up. Dozens of you who had never once sat through a Planning Commission meeting showed up, wrote in, made noise. The project that was supposedly routine got continued not once, not twice, but three separate times. Job well done…right?
It got approved anyway, on May 27. Now two separate groups of your neighbors have filed appeals. City Council decides their fate on August 18. I’ve spent weeks going through the record since, and the deeper I dig, the less this looks like one bad vote, and the more it looks like a system built, piece by piece, to make sure votes like this always land the same way.
Here’s the plainest fact in the whole mess, and I want you to sit with it: the Port of Portland owns the ground under Hillsboro Airport. Not the City of Hillsboro. A regional agency headquartered clear across the river controls 415 acres inside our city limits, leases it to whoever it wants, and our own Planning Commission has spent months telling residents, in so many words: we can look at the fence, we can’t look at what comes over it. We can watch and suffer with the jets bombing over our City, but we have no say in how many and when they get to do that.
Accident? Or exactly the structure somebody wanted?
TWO APPEALS, ONE HEARING: HERE’S WHO AND WHAT
Let’s get this straight, because most of the coverage so far has treated this as one appeal. It’s two.
Appeal-001-26, led by Miki Barnes of Oregon Aviation Watch, joined by Trevor Southard, Linda Howey, Karna Sheth, Blaine Ackley, Helen Krieger, Greg Driscoll, David Barnes, and Christopher Bockstahler. This group asked for an “on the record” hearing; Council reviews only what’s already in the file.
Appeal-002-26, led by Sarah Richmond, joined by Brett Hamilton and Valerie Pratt, three Washington County residents out of Beaverton and Tualatin. This group asked for a de novo hearing, new evidence allowed.
Both go after the same Hillsboro Planning Commission May 27 approval, Order No. 8492. City Council hears them together on August 18. And here’s a detail I don’t think anybody else has flagged: city planning staff is recommending Council grant de novo treatment to BOTH appeals, including the Barnes group, which specifically did not ask for that. Staff’s reasoning is that “on the record” hearings are a hassle to administer.
The City Council will make that decision this Tuesday night, and it has big implications. It is listed as Item 4.1 on the Consent Agenda, and I am guessing that the Council does not understand this issue (yet) and that Staff will try to blow past it fast. Let’s hope not.
Maybe that’s just tidy paperwork. Or maybe somebody ought to ask Miki Barnes, on the record, whether she wanted the tighter format for a reason, and whether the rest of us should be comfortable watching staff overrule that choice before Council has even voted.
One more thing buried in that report: staff notes the Richmond appeal raises seventeen separate issues. The Barnes/OAW appeal raises six, and Barnes’s own filing states flat-out that appellants don’t want to be boxed into just those six. Don’t be surprised if August 18 covers a lot more ground than either appeal document suggests on paper.
From Appellant Brett Hamilton: “The fact that there are two appeals (each paying the City more than $3000 in filing fees) demonstrates just how unpopular and problematic Sky Harbor’s proposal is, and how motivated the community is to stop it. From Tualatin to North Plains, residents are waking up (no pun intended) to the impacts that these jet flights will have. The community is getting involved and pitching in to fund the legal fight. Tualatin Riverkeepers are accepting donations, and yard signs are going up in Hillsboro and all along the flight path.”
This apellant group has a petition online- https://www.oregonair.org/
THE APPROVAL THAT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO NEED APPROVING
Here’s the detail that made me sit up straight. By the time this thing reached its final vote on May 27, Sky Harbour had quietly dropped every single Major Adjustment it originally needed, including the reduced setback, the front-yard parking exception, the landscaping waivers, all of it. Once those were gone, this project didn’t legally need a Planning Commission hearing at all. Under our own code, it drops to a Type II, staff signs off, no public hearing required.
Sky Harbour didn’t take that exit. It kept the public hearing running anyway, after redesigning its way out of needing one.
Why would a company voluntarily keep a public hearing alive after making the changes that let it skip one? I’ll let you chew on that one yourselves. But I’ll say this much: maybe the hearing was never where this outcome was actually going to be decided. Maybe it was just the room where you got to feel heard.
THE Hillsboro Planning COMMISSION ADMITTED THE DEAL WAS FLAWED, THEN APPROVED IT ANYWAY
This is the sentence I cannot get out of my head. In the final motion to approve, ON THE RECORD, Commissioner Anne Thrall-Nash said the standard requiring negative impacts be “sufficiently minimized or mitigated” had not been met. Not “might not be.” Not “close call.” Has not been sufficiently minimized or mitigated.
The fix? A six-foot masonry wall, tacked on as a condition right there on the spot, after public testimony had already closed. No resident, no engineer, nobody got a chance to ask whether a wall does one thing about jet blast, heat, or exhaust coming out of forty-five-foot hangar doors. Does a wall stop turbine noise at 3 a.m.? Does it filter what comes out of a fuel farm? Or does it just block your view of the problem?
According to the appellants’ own filing, the Commission’s written order doesn’t even include the finding Thrall-Nash said out loud. If that holds up, ask yourself what it means that the one moment a commissioner told the truth is the one moment that didn’t make it into the official record.
THE FEDERAL REVIEW THAT VANISHED BEFORE ANYONE COULD READ IT
Follow the FAA paper trail if you want to see the jurisdictional shell game laid bare, plain as day. We pulled this information from the Richmond/Hamilton/Pratt appeal narrative:
– The FAA waived full environmental review on March 6, 2026.
– Nobody in Hillsboro saw that waiver until April 8, after the 20-day federal window to challenge it had already slammed shut.
– The 140-page application behind that waiver, where the Port of Portland characterized noise, air quality, and environmental-justice impacts, wasn’t handed over until June 3, one day AFTER the City had already mailed its decision. Residents got it because they filed a public records request. Nobody offered it up.
How many of you sitting in the hearing knew, at the time, the federal review had already been quietly waived off? How many were told “that’s the FAA’s job” by people who already knew the FAA had stepped away from the table? And our own code gives the City authority to demand independent noise and air studies exactly when a project like this rolls in, so why wasn’t it used?
Everybody had a reason it wasn’t their job. I don’t buy coincidence on this one.
EVEN OUR NEIGHBORS NOTICED
It’s not just Hillsboro residents raising the alarm here. The Mayor and City Council President of Tualatin, a different city entirely, mind you, wrote in against this, flagging up to $3.6 million a year in potential lost county tax revenue and pointing out that more than 20,000 residents in the flight corridors got zero notice. When elected officials from OUTSIDE your own city feel the need to tell your Planning Commission it’s dropping the ball, that ought to be a five-alarm fire, not a footnote.
HOW MANY FLIGHTS? HOW MUCH IMPACT? A SIDE-BY-SIDE
We are going to have to live with this. All of us in the Tualatin Valley and especially those of us in Hillsboro and more so those in the flight path. But how many more flights per se are we going to have tearing open our skies and disrupting our peace? Here are all the numbers that are actually in the public record for this project. Judge for yourself.
WHAT THE APPLICANT SAYS TODAY (final application, approved May 27):
– 30 aircraft, capacity
– 1.2 round-trip flights per week, average, sitewide (per applicant’s own estimate, as reported by the Hillsboro News-Times)
– That works out to about 35 flights per week in addition to what we already have.
WHAT THE SAME PROJECT SAID JUST MONTHS EARLIER (per Sarah Richmond’s May 20, 2026 letter to the Planning Commission, based on an earlier version of the application):
– 38-42 aircraft, capacity
– No flight-frequency estimate was provided at all at that stage, according to the letter
WHAT’S MISSING, PER THE APPELLANTS:
– No independent noise study
– No independent air-quality analysis
– No cumulative-impact review
– No traffic analysis specific to jet operations
– The Tualatin City Council’s own letter states the flight-activity number was pulled from “Sky Harbour’s slowest locations” elsewhere in the country, not modeled on Hillsboro’s market
WORTH ASKING YOURSELF:
If the true number of flights ends up closer to the 38-42 aircraft capacity than the current 30, and if Hillsboro’s proximity to Silicon Forest wealth makes it anything but Sky Harbour’s “slowest location”, how much daily activity would this site actually generate? Nobody has published that study. That’s not a number I’m going to invent for you. It’s the number the Planning Commission approved this project without ever requiring.
WHY HILLSBORO?
Here’s a question worth asking out loud, even though I can’t hand you the paperwork to prove the answer: why would a luxury private-jet company pick Hillsboro, of every general-aviation field in this whole region, for its first Pacific Northwest campus?
Coincidence that Hillsboro is the home of the Silicon Forest, minutes from some of the highest concentrations of executive wealth in this state? Coincidence that the airport answers to a Port authority thirty minutes away instead of the city whose residents live under its flight path? Coincidence that oversight here is split three ways: City, Port, FAA, so every single one of them can honestly say the loudest complaint isn’t theirs to fix?
I don’t have Sky Harbour’s boardroom memos, and I’m not going to pretend I do (opinion coming, folks). But when a gap this convenient lines up this neatly with a client base this wealthy, I think it’s fair for every one of us to ask who that gap was built for.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Three governments hold pieces of this. The City, the Port of Portland, and the FAA have, at some point, pointed at each other when a resident asked who’s responsible for the noise over their house. Planning Commission President Jones-Gallardo told residents flat out to call their state legislators. That’s honest. It’s also an admission: the body making the final local land-use call knows full well it isn’t the body that can protect you from what it just approved.
Loophole? Or, after watching this play out again and again at Hillsboro City Hall, on data centers, and now on this, is it just how the machine was built to run? If so, we must look back at the last two or three mayors and ask who did this and why aren’t things more centered on our own people?
City Council hears both appeals on August 18. Whether they actually grapple with the FAA timeline, the last-minute wall, and a redesign that let Sky Harbour dodge its own violations, or just rubber-stamp what the Commission already did, will tell you everything you need to know about who City Hall really answers to.
This is just my opinion. I think it’s a well-earned one after 55 years watching this town. I’ll be there on August 18. I hope you will too. Are you noticing a theme here- jet-owning Tech Bros come to town – Hillsboro is powerless at City Hall to stop that. Data Centers, Tech Bros, and the richest Private Equity Funds in the world take over Hillsboro. City Hall does nothing and is powerless against the state-mandated Enterprise Zone deals- supposedly. Now, a lawsuit has been filed against the City for failing to act on those tax abatement deals. So how is it that we are so powerless as a City? It is not an accident. Hillsboro has been the epicenter of growth in Oregon for the past 30 years, and the answers to my suppositions are intertwined with our current state of existence.
Think about all of that when you vote this Fall for Council leaders. More of the same is not working.
How is this a surprise? The Port of Portland’s long term plan document from 2017 shows the area where the hangers are going as “Corporate Aviation”.
We live by the second busiest airport in Oregon and an airport that at one time had scheduled passenger service. There are going to be planes. The jets aren’t nearly as annoying as some of the prop planes or helicopters and at least they don’t burn leaded fuel like the prop planes
At the very least there must be fewer operations and a limit on operating hours.