There are plenty of us in Colorado watching this one. There’s a very hostile faction around KJBC who wants to shut it down so they can hand it over to developers. One part of its lynchpin claims is that lead in the groundwater is poisoning school kids and causing cancer. Another is lead is settling on their window sills. The supporters through an FOIA request dug up a buried formal, scienticic report that said the only place in the area affected by lead was ONE. SINGLE, HOUSE with known lead problems, and there are NO health reports involving kids’ health or cancer patients.
Never mind that the airport is right next to a major highway and surrounded by smaller ones that have been there for a long time before our cars required unleaded. Never mind the decades when leaded fuel was the only thing. Lead just doesn’t go away. Ir should still be there.
I think the term is “Chicken Little Syndrome.”
There’s also the noise issue. A rep from my club attended the “listening session” you mentioned, three hours held IN A HANGAR WITH THE DOOR OPEN AND NO INTERRUPTIONS. Some jamoke claimed he had to sleep in the closet and most of the others complained about noise, not the jets coming and going, but “little airplanes buzzing and circling our houses” from touch-and-go ops. So T&G, the same practice as always was, is now a weapon for detractors.
Never mind there is no lead problem, never mind little airplanes fly normal predictable patterns at normal predictable altitudes and don’t buzz your house. I could go on about how the FAA REQUIRES the airport to stay open as it is the base for emergency and firefighting in our region and the next available airport is DIA. Never mind the bazillions it puts into the economy on top of the FAA subsidies it gets. It looks like the next step will be huge, stinkly, hysterical, loud and frivolous lawsuits, because nowadays, that’s what it takes to be a bully.