Thursday, May 8, 2008
Fosters
The Rochester City Council filed a new flight plan Tuesday night — one that called for not landing at Skyhaven Airport.
Last month, the council, on a 9-4 vote, opted to have the city own the airport. It was a rescission of a 6-6 vote in February that failed to advance a position on the city’s intent regarding the airport.
Tuesday night’s vote was 7-5 with remarks by Deputy Mayor Elaine Lauterborn putting a credible face on the folly of Rochester owning the facility adjacent to Route 108 and near the top of Rochester Hill.
In April, Lauterborn voted to pursue city ownership. Tuesday night she conceded the city cannot take on even minor costs associated with the facility.
“The smallest percentage of the money that is the responsibility of Rochester is still a significant amount,” Lauterborn said.
As for capital improvements that will most surely evolve to keep the airport current in future years, the deputy mayor offered, “I do believe the PDA (the Pease Development Authority) is in a better position to deal with the capital costs” that will be made necessary in the future.
The City Council got it right this time.
There have been three votes on Skyhaven and the council has flown back and forth and back again. While no one was advocating another flight in the wake of Tuesday night’s vote, there were signs of leaving a hangar door open until May 30, the present deadline for a decision on whether Rochester will absorb the airport and its uncertainties or let it go to the PDA with its knowledge of general aviation and managing an airport.
City Manager John Scruton wasn’t going to speculate on whether there would be another shift in the wind and the usually seldom inscrutable Councilor Sandra Keans simply said, “one never knows.”
City councilors felt the direct heat of public opinion Tuesday and there were times when it wasn’t pretty.
It was an energized opposition crowd that voiced its feelings in unmasked anger.
“You won’t get in again,” a woman warned first-term Councilor Geoffrey Hamman, who again voted for city ownership.
Fred Leonard, no stranger to Rochester politics, stepped over the line in throwing a sign in the direction of Hamman. This came after he shouted — while the voting was taking place — “Some people have no honor” adding in anger, “There’s going to be a revolution.”
Pity the revolutionaries with Leonard as a member.
The suggestion of Rochester owning an airport in the best of times is not something with which many people will feel comfortable. While politics in Rochester is cyclical, it’s a community in which the cycle can turn on a dime.
The city’s streets and roads are a mess and have been for some time. The money to make lasting repairs is seldom present and even when it is, the quality of the work has been known to raise some eyebrows.
Confrontation is as much a part of Rochester city government as corn beef is with cabbage.
Rochester is a community in which political maturity does not get high marks. But so it has been as long as some septuagenarians can remember. It doesn’t have to own an airport to spice things up.
The thought of a Rochester City Council being the final arbiter in matters of importance to the airport and its future creates a cold and clammy feeling.
Let it go. The Pease Development Authority is prepared and qualified to take over Skyhaven Airport and save the Rochester City Council from itself.
Let it go. Please, let it go.