Hailey Mayor Susan McBryant is shrugging off airport site-selection criticism from Sun Valley Co. General Manager Wally Huffman as "consistent" with his strategy to "target Hailey" for refusing to agree to his ideas for the future of Friedman Memorial Airport.
She also rejected Huffman's proposal for a new, larger airport authority that would include representatives of Blaine County as well as all the Wood River Valley's cities.
"We've been down that road," McBryant said Thursday. Prior to the creation of the five-member Friedman Memorial Airport Authority, the Hailely airfield was managed by an 11-member board consisting of city and county representatives and one from the state of Idaho.
McBryant said the larger board was "contentious and highly ineffective" and ran the airport at a deficit.
"We're now operating more financially effectively and have sustained a high volume" of airline and general aviation traffic.
The present authority is appointed by the airport's owners, the city of Hailey and Blaine County. The entities each appoint two members and jointly select one independent member, who is usually connected with aviation.
Huffman, who sat on the 25-member airport site selection committee that studied whether the airport should be relocated and where it might go, issued a statement Tuesday flailing Hailey for "politics" in its decisions affecting the airport, then proposed the new management structure.
He was reacting to a 1,600-word joint statement by Hailey, Blaine County and the Airport Authority on Monday reiterating its decision not to expand Friedman and not to designate the Bellevue Triangle as a new airport site. He withheld any criticism of Blaine County, whose County Commission chairwoman, Sarah Michael, was the only commissioner who didn't sign the joint communiqué.
McBryant, who also sits as vice chair of the Airport Authority, characterized Huffman's criticism as the result of Huffman being miffed by those decisions. Huffman has claimed that any airport farther away from Hailey than the Bellevue Triangle would be "devastating" to the area's tourism economy.
The Hailey mayor has been outspoken in her opposition to expanding Friedman, not only because of probable costs of $40 million or more. She has also been critical of the number of nearby homes in the Woodside area that would be condemned and the disruption to the valley by the time required to relocate state Highway 75 eastward.
Details of the exact impact of expanding Friedman will be unveiled at a special Sept. 28 Airport Authority meeting when consultants will present illustrations of several expansion scenarios -- one to the east, one to the west and one to the south -- along with probable costs.
How long the airport would need to be closed for such a major project—some estimates are as long as a year—also will be discussed.
The meeting will be at 6 p.m. in the Community Campus auditorium of the old Wood River High School in Hailey.
The joint city-county-airport statement, published as a full-page newspaper ad, also drew criticism from the Blaine County Pilots Association, whose president, Carlton Green, issued a statement condemning one phrase in the ad as a "politically motivated tactic" ... "intended to promote fear." The phrase hinted that Friedman's confined area could lead to an aircraft crashing into a school or senior center located north of the airport.
(Editor's note: Members of the Friedman Memorial Airport Authority, with Hailey city leaders and two of three Blaine County commissioners, published this week in local newspapers a full-page display advertisement that states their position on the proposed relocation of the airport. The advertisement, printed on Page 5 of this (print) edition of the Idaho Mountain Express and Page B24 of the (print) July 27 edition, states that Friedman will not be expanded and a new airport will have to be located somewhere other than Hailey or the Bellevue Triangle. A news article in the July 27 Mountain Express summarized a response to the ad by Sun Valley Co. General Manager Wally Huffman, a frequent critic of the airport site-selection process. Huffman's full response to the Airport Authority's statement appears here.)
