To the Editor,

On April 20, 2023, from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., John Goodman, RIAC’s public relations executive, will be standing by at the Sawtooth Building with a cadre of consultants to answer our questions about the T.F. Green passenger terminal road loops – potentially sending car-crushing trailer trucks down these roads. He will be writing down our questions to send off to the FAA along with RIAC’s answers.

Here are my questions:

Why have the FAA-required 2012 EIS safety improvements to the passenger terminal road loops not been made in the past ten years, and when will RIAC do this?

Why is RIAC insisting on sending UPS trailer trucks through very tight and unsafe passenger terminal road loops?

Here is the bottom line: RIAC needs to send the trailer trucks through the passenger terminal loop roads to justify the requested $30 million in federal funding for a Strawberry Fields expansion of air cargo operations.

UPS does not need to send its trailer trucks through the passenger terminal loop roads, and it should, and probably will, say no at the end of the day.

If UPS says no today, before the Environmental Assessment is completed, the federal financing falls through. Without a “public” component, without UPS, the proposed facility becomes a private FedEx venture to offload Boston market eCommerce operations to Warwick. FAA does not fund private projects.

So, the City Fathers should do at least one thing for the people of Warwick, for the airport’s neighbors, and all of us who fly out of Green: They should ask UPS, right now, if it has any intention of driving its trucks through the passenger terminal road loops.

Toward this end, it would help for as many of us as possible to attend the meeting at the Sawtooth (AAA) Building where we can register our comments and ask our questions, to have RIAC write them all down and send them to the FAA. Every one of our comments is important. FAA needs to hear them all. And that’s the law.

If nothing else, our questions about UPS trucks running through the passenger terminal might force UPS to say “No.”  Especially if the City asks UPS what it plans to do.

UPS operations and T.F. Green need not compromise our safety to continue to prosper.

Richard Langseth

Warwick