[TB] I'm not sure I want a hermit for a mayor. Part of a mayor's jobI'm also glad the Mayor Rybak went to Rochester and is talking with other cities about a state-wide aviation plan because if the largest cities like Minneapolis don't help further such plans, they are likely never to come to fruition or success. If Minnesota wants to be competitive in national and international business markets, we need to address the problems that Mayor Rybak is talking about with regards to air freight. If it doubly benefits us here in Minneapolis by both improving the state's economic climate and decreasing the jet noise for south Minneapolis, then it's time well spent.
is promoting the city, learning what works and doesn't work elsewhere
and just getting out of the office from time to time.
Terrell Brown is imagining a false situation. We are not shipping freight via air from the Minneapolis airport; we are shipping it via truck to Chicago and then via air freight from there. So if a company in Minneapolis wanted to ship something to say Munich, Germany, it would be a choice of an hour or two to Rochester, or 6 to 8 hours to Chicago via truck. Note that we already have more than 2 airports. Note that there are 2 major airports in Chicago, likewise in Washington DC, and more than 2 in many large metro areas, such as San Francisco. It's entirely possible to support multiple airports -- in fact, I'd argue it's more a case of multiple airports supporting surrounding industry; they are an advantage, not a cost center.That being said, the 2 airport strategy is a loser, it just doesn't fly. It's expensive to operate 2 airports, who's going to pay for it?
Why do people and especially freight fly? To save time, freight is often very time critical. Freight goes by air to prevent assembly lines from shutting down and plant managers sending their employees home. Fly something into Rochester or St. Cloud and it needs another hour and a half to drive to Minneapolis. Then it needs an additional load/unload cycle.
Let's also make it clear that a most of this freight is not originating in Minneapolis. I chose Munich as the example city in the previous paragraph because a company called FSI International in Chaska does exactly this. There are lots of companies all over the state of Minnesota that ship via air freight internationally.
One of the few smart things Denver did when they built a new airport isDenver was anything but smart when it came to the new airport. The new airport is a great example of graft, corruption and pork-barrel. There is no doubt they needed a new airport outside of the city, and most of those reasons apply to doing the same thing here -- but we are not building a new airport like Denver did. The only advantage we have over Denver's former Stapleton airport is that our parallel runways are far enough apart that they can be used during certain kinds of inclement weather and Stapleton's were not.
they shut down the old one and redeveloped the site. At least they
aren't paying to operate dual airports.
Further, while they did shut down the old airport, that hardly means that the new airport is the only airport in the Denver metro area. In fact, Jefferson County Airport, just a few miles northwest of downtown Denver -- and much closer to downtown Denver than the new airport -- is one of the busiest reliever airports in the nation, and has been expanded a number of times.
I happen to know quite a bit about the situation in Denver because I moved to Minneapolis from a Denver suburb, because I'm a pilot, and because my parents, brother and sister still live in the Denver area. The fact that Denver shut down Stapleton after building the _largest airport in the nation_, Denver International (DIA), provides zero argument for not looking into spreading Minnesota air traffic to several airports, such as Rochester, Duluth or St. Cloud.
If I understand Terrell Brown correctly here, then I agree. If the state actually prohibited land banking for a new airport, a fact I did not know, then that has got to be one of the most short-sighted, special-interest favoring (Northwest Airlines), anti-public-interest things this state has ever done.The mistake we made when we ended the dual track airport study a decade ago was write a prohibition into state law against land banking for a new airport. Those decisions by that Legislature virtually guaranteed that the current MSP will grow and prosper for the remaining lives of most of us on this list.
As a pilot, I usually side with pilots, airports and aviation businesses. For example, I generally side with the airport when new neighbors complain about the noise. In fact, the aforementioned Jefferson County Airport faces that problem. For decades, it was on a plateau surrounded by farmland and wasteland, with only a slight proximity to one corner of Broomfield, Colorado -- the town where I graduated from high school. But Broomfield has been growing, like much of the Colorado "front range" cities (essentially the interstate 25 corridor). Broomfield has aggressively annexed lots of rural land. So it was no surprise when some housing developer built a few hundred new homes on the newly annexed west side of Broomfield on the north edge of an industrial park. Sure enough, the new residents of those homes complained about airport noise and insisted the airport be closed down.
Frankly, I thought they were idiots. They knew the airport was there. There was no pressing need to build homes in that location, given the amount of open terrain, the quality of terrain, the proximity to the airport and to an industrial area, and so forth.
I am always in favor of the greater public good, unlike the vast majority of selfish people and politicians today, it seems. The Minneapolis airport was there before the closest homes were built, and certainly before 99% of the people living in areas affected by airport noise. On those grounds, one might imagine I'd say "tough luck" just like I did to the people around the JeffCo airport in Colorado.
But there are some large differences. Minneapolis airport noise affects homes that existed before the airport. Where I live, the jets are quite noisy at times. While my home was only built in 1941, my neighbors on the street to the rear all live in homes built between 1900 and 1925. The Minneapolis airport, formerly the Twin Cities Motor Speedway, was christened Wold-Chamberlain Field in 1921. Northwest Airlines got its start in 1926 in St. Paul. Wold-Chamberlain Field (MSP) got its first commercial airline, Hanford Airlines, in 1933.
So a significant number of homes affected by airport noise precede the airport. More importantly, the size of the airport, the number of flights per day and the noise made by each aircraft have increased exponentially since then. The few older, propeller driven aircraft that pass over my house are not nearly as noisy as the fleet of older jets with "hush kits" that Northwest Airlines flies today. Since the original airport was built on the speedway grounds, it has grown much larger in geographical size, too. In fact, in just the past few years it grew again, as it took the New Ford Town neighborhood and the Rich Acres Golf Course away from the city of Richfield to built another runway.
The reasons the dual-track airport study was stopped and why we are expanding our current airport instead of building a new one elsewhere (as Denver did) have next to nothing to do with practicality, logic or the best interests of the public and state as a whole. The primary reasons the dual-track study got axed are:
1. Northwest Airlines whined, bitched, moaned and complained, and backed that up with a lot of backroom dealing and spreading money around lobbying and buying off officials. NWA did this because NWA executives, like most corporate executives these days, only care about their personal short term gain, which means they only care about the companies' stock prices and profitability over the next few quarters at most. They do not take a long view on the health of company. Likewise, they like many people and politicians, are terrified of change and of the unknown. If it's different, it must be bad. Therefore, rather than risking doing something different, where they couldn't line their pockets the very next quarter but might have to wait a few years, they chose to oppose any change in every possible way.
2. Like the fearful, short-sighted and greedy executives running NWA, the politicians involved were likewise uninterested in finding facts, using rational thinking or planning for Minnesota's future 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Their eyes were on the lobbyists and the next election.
3. The Metropolitan Airports Commission is so closely tied to NWA, it would extremely hard for them to do or recommend anything NWA didn't support.
Would it have been expensive and difficult to build a new airport? Yes. Would it have been better for the Twin Cities and the state of Minnesota over the long run? Yes. The hard question is whether A is greater than B, or B is greater than A. But rather than emperically and logically trying to make best estimates of both, NWA and the politicians simply killed the process lest any undesirable answers come out of it.
I applaud Mayor Rybak for taking the initiative in moving this kind of thinking ahead. I wish it much success.
As for focusing on Hawthorne and Jordan, instead of doing this -- well, if Minnesota and Minneapolis become has-beens in the world of commerce, we won't have any money or jobs to fix those problems in north Minneapolis. That guns are being fired in neighborhoods in no way relegates all other problems to the trash bin, to be ignored until the "gun problem" is solved.
Chris Johnson Fulton
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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