This article is more than a week old, but I read through it and I think it makes some good points. I know the CCA debate is old hat, but its a slow day for me and I thought this made for some good reading.
Muni is not 'my' airport
Campaign an attempt to get taxpayers to foot bill for private interests By Lorne Gunter,
[email protected]ne 21, 2009
"Airport Not For Sale" is the message on the indignant placards that are springing up on private lawns and public boulevards around the city in an effort to pressure council into not selling the City Centre Airport for commercial and residential redevelopment.
"Save Your Airport," the signs add. "Fight for Flight."
Pardon me. Save whose airport? "Your Airport," the signs proclaim, meaning yours and mine.
Sorry, but I fly in and out of Edmonton a dozen or more times each year. And I have not taken a flight from "the Muni" in 20 years.
No, wait, that's wrong. The department of National Defence once flew me and a bunch of other journalists up to Cold Lake to watch jet fighter training exercises and we left from City Centre. So once in 200 or more flights, I have flown out of that airport.
If by "Your Airport," the organizers of the sneering "Airport Not For Sale" campaign mean "My Airport," then they are mistaken. My airport is Edmonton International.
I may not like the fact that I have to drive so far south of the city to reach "My Airport," although since the Anthony Henday opened the drive is now about five minutes shorter.
I may wish scheduled passenger flights were still operating out of the downtown airport. Certainly those people who work downtown and fly back and forth to Calgary wish it.
But the fact remains, the voters of this city decided by plebiscite more than two decades ago to make Edmonton International "Our Airport." Too much work and momentum has
gone into diverting air business to the North Leduc location to go back now. It's time city council finished the process by turning the land our other airport sits on into housing for nearly 25,000 people.
Those who want City Centre kept open are really just demanding that the rest of Edmontonians subsidize their desired outcome.
They want the airport to survive, but they don't want to pay its full annual operating costs themselves and they don't want to make up to ratepayers the property tax reduction we would enjoy if the land were sold to developers, to say nothing of the loss of an exciting new development in the city core.
On Thursday, the City released consultants' reports that show the profit from sale of the airport would net between $91 million and $335 million.
While this is down from projections of $486 million a year ago, it is still a sizable chunk of change, enough in the best-case scenario to lower property taxes by two per cent or more a year for 35 years.
It would also end the annual operating losses at the Muni-estimated at over $1 million a year-that users of the regions' other airports must cover in higher landing taxes and airfares.
It's not much, admittedly. But I don't see the supporters of City Centre clamouring to pay extra out of their own pockets to cover the real annual costs of their airport choice.
If the effort to save the airport was more than a selfish, self-interested endeavour, the organizers' slogan would be: "Sell Us the Airport."
If the Kingsway Business Association and the Edmonton Enterprise Group and others want the airport kept open, let them buy and operate it as a private airport. If they are so sure a second airport in a city of one million is such a viable enterprise, let them take the risk to own and run it.
But, of course, if they had to pay $483 million for it or $335 million or even just$91 million, they would never do it. So their demand boils down to insisting that you and I pay for their vision for them by leaving the airport as is and for the next three-and-a-half decades paying higher municipal taxes than we would have to.
No thanks. The airport savers should also stop trying to argue that the use of the 217-hectare site as an airport generates anywhere near the economic activity that would be generated were the field converted into a residential community for nearly 25,000 with a transportation hub, an expanded campus for NAIT and shops, restaurants, parks and offices. The reason airports are built on marginal land on the fringes of cities -as City Centre was when it opened 80 years ago-is that their low-intensity activities (relative to commercial and residential uses)make airports uneconomical in city centres where land prices are at a premium.
What's more, the medevac argument is a canard. Of the 87,000 takeoffs and landings at the airport last year, just three per cent were medevac flights and fewer than 400 of those (less than one-half of one per cent)were flights with critical patients. If fixed-wing medevac flights were impossible after City Centre closed, those 400 would not die. Rather, their rescues would most likely be switched to helicopters that land directly at hospitals.
There may be a lot of arguments for keeping City Centre an airport, but none of them is convincing.
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Health/Muni+airport/1717970/story.html
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