Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Commissioner: Community is divided

Airport Authority may hire PR consultant

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By KATHERINE WUTZ
Express Staff Writer

     Despite vehement public opposition from Hailey and Bellevue residents, one BlaineCounty commissioner stated Tuesday that expansion rather than relocation of FriedmanMemorialAirport may be the valley’s best option.

     Though the two BlaineCounty commissioners present at Tuesday’s meeting—Angenie McCleary and Larry Schoen—said the community needs to be on the same page regarding the airport process, Schoen said he isn’t sure that’s possible.

     “This project is plagued by people not all operating from the same set of assumptions,” he said. “[Public comments on the airport] are evidence of the blistering parochialism that still exists in this valley.”

     Schoen’s remarks were in apparent reference to the sometimes hostile public comments at last week’s Airport Authority board meeting, when Bellevue residents turned out in force to protest any expansion at the airport’s current site and even questioned the need for any commercial air traffic to the valley.

     Most of the opposition centers on suggestions that Friedman’s current runway could be shifted to the south or realigned to the southwest. That would bring the commercial flight path directly over The Mountain School and the Chantrelle subdivision on the north side of Bellevue.

     Hailey Councilwoman and Airport Authority Board Member Martha Burke said last week that she shared the concerns of south valley residents, but her role as a board member forced her to look at the big picture.

     “If you were sitting here and thought about the well-being of the entire community, you might need to put your personal views aside,” she said.

     Schoen has so far not weighed in during the public airport meetings conducted over the past three weeks, as he has been out of the country. However, he said Tuesday that he believes expansion to be the best option.

     “I am very supportive of considering expansion at the current site,” he said, even proposing that the county refer to the project as the “Air Service Modernization and Improvement Project” rather than the “Replacement Airport Project.”

     McCleary balked at that, saying renaming the project was a decision that should be made by the entire authority, including the Hailey representatives.

     “I thought about retitling it for the agendas,” she said. “But I thought that was maybe stepping outside my role … and making decisions that hadn’t been made.”

     Both McCleary and Schoen agreed on the need for the authority to hire a public relations consultant to educate the community. McCleary said she was stopped twice over the weekend by concerned residents with questions about the airport, and Schoen said many of the public comments at the authority’s meetings have been based on faulty information.

     “There is obviously a big gap in education,” Schoen said.

     But along with education must come new solutions to problems that have plagued the county for decades, said former Blaine County Commissioner Len Harlig.

    “[It’s as though] I keep seeing the same movie over and over again, and the ending never changes,” Harlig said. “We have to get past the point of insanity.”

Katherine Wutz: kwutz@mtexpress.com

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