The Airport

Topic 1: The Airport – Aug 7 Work Session

These are my notes, the notes of one citizen who attended. They are not minutes of the meeting. I post them here, because if you wait for the official minutes to come out, it will be October, and then if there were anything discussed that you wanted to take action about, it will be too late. If anyone was there and had a different take on what happened, just hit the Comments button and add your two cents.
1. Property tax reduction on aircraft.

The first issue for the airport was the reduction of the property tax on aircraft from $3.90 to 50 cents. A committee had been appointed previously to study this. The recommendation from the Airport Commission was that the tax had to be reduced in order to attract people to park their planes at our airport, because the surrounding counties had a low tax or no tax. The committee concluded that we needed to change our formula on how to calculate the value of the airplane. We had previously been depreciating the airplane quickly, just as we do on cars. By changing our assessment of a plane’s value to something like it’s “Blue Book” equivalent value, we could get the same total revenue at a 50 cent tax rate as we currently do at $3.90. This total is something in the area of $11,000 in tax revenue, so it’s not a big part of the county budget. The compelling reason to do this is to attract more aircraft to be parked there, so we can justify building more hangars, extending the runway, and upgrading the overall airport. The key to our reason for doing this is that we can get grant money for all of it, and having a bigger and nicer airport makes the community more attractive to business.

If the Supervisors turn down this request to reduce the property tax rate, it is the same as saying they don’t want the airport to attract more planes, and then it won’t need more hangars, or be in a good position to get the grant money.

Regarding the extension of the runway and the people who have received letters that the airport wants to buy their land: This topic wasn’t brought up at the meeting, but I asked Powell Markowitz to explain it. He said some people have received letters, but there is no invocation of eminent domain in this process. He said the airport was negotiating in good faith, with multiple independent assessors to determine the value, and that they would negotiate the purchases, not force the sales.

As far as the extension of the runway in the north direction, that is a long term plan, not expected until 2014 or later. If you have received a letter asking to buy your land, that's exactly what it is. A request. The County Supervisors have not been involved in this. It is not an eminent domain situation.

The Supervisors decided to call a special public hearing to consider the question of whether to reduce the property tax on aircraft (and remember the comments were that this is pretty nearly the same as considering whether to expand the airport). So if this is an important issue to YOU, you have to attend the public hearing and make your voice known. There will be a teeny, tiny notice in the classifieds section of the Page News when this is scheduled. Or, you can keep watching this website, and sign yourself up to receive notices from NewsList@PageCountyWatch.org and I’ll let you know when it’s scheduled.

Alice’s Opinion (which falls under the category “Everybody has one”)
This is a perfect example of the process by which the county (perhaps all counties, but definitely this county) operates. The question is never put to the citizens, “Do you want to have an expanded airport, with both the consequences and the benefits of such?”. There is no public debate, answering the questions posted in the comments section of the Blog, “Taking Land Again”. Nobody poses the big questions: what are the benefits, what are the consequences, what is the big picture. From what I heard, I doubt that the county supervisors are even AWARE that citizens received letters from the Airport Commission notifying them that the airport intended to buy their land. It surely didn’t come up at any Supervisors meeting in the last six months. Now, the thing is, if the airport intends to buy your land, and you don’t want to sell, what will happen? Either you will eventually decide that they are making an offer you can’t refuse, or they will eventually decide they can solve their problem by buying somebody else’s land, and your house will be sitting there surrounded by an airport, deteriorating in market value with every takeoff and landing. So in truth, if your house is next to an airport, and the airport wants to expand, you might as well start looking for a better place to live. These are not eminent domain “takings”. They’re going to negotiate with you in good faith. But there is no doubt, your bargaining position is considerably weak.

But back to the big picture. From what I’ve seen, the county isn’t going to hold a public meeting to discuss the wisdom of expanding the airport. That’s something that should have been done in the Comprehensive Plan, but wasn’t, because of the previously examined glaring deficiencies of such plan. (See this Blog in June and July) Rather than open debate on the big picture, the county is going to post a small notice in the Classifieds that invites citizens to a public hearing on whether or not we should lower the property tax rate on aircraft.

It doesn’t say, “Should we or should we not expand the airport, and here are the downsides and the upsides.”

It says, “Should we lower the property tax rate on aircraft?” Citizens see it, but they don’t understand the implications of the question, so they don’t show up at the meeting.

The answer to should we lower the property tax rate on aircraft is: Do we or do we not want to expand the airport? If we do, then yes, we should lower the property tax rate on aircraft. That we want to expand the airport is taken as a “given” by the Supervisors, but never posed as a question or a debate to the people.

As a result, citizens don’t understand the implications of the question asked, so it becomes difficult to have a researched, intelligent, and thoughtful comment to add at the public hearing. Our public hearings then become a forum for a handful of frustrated people, who wonder why the Supervisors don’t pay any attention to them.

So my opinion is: Yes, we should expand the airport, and we need to lower the property tax rate on aircraft in order to do that. But my opinion is based on my desire to see more business come to the county, and a totally unproven and unstudied bias, based on subjective and unfounded feelings that a bigger airport would be an attraction for business. Your opinion might be different from mine, and neither of us can point to any set of facts or studies to say anything either way.

And why don’t we ever have that public debate? Because we didn’t open up the development of our Comprehensive Plan to a large group of people, with diverse viewpoints, and we didn’t have the public debates about the big picture that a Comprehensive Plan requires. We didn’t develop a Land Use Map, like the Virginia Code requires, and now we’re faced with making every decision out of context.

That’s Alice’s Opinion, for what one citizen’s opinion is worth.

2. Luray Landing’s storm drain proposal

Now, the other airport issue discussed was the Luray Landing plan to put a dry pond at the end of the airport runway, in the no-fly zone. The Airport Commission wants them to put it somewhere else, and the issue here was that there is disorganization in the discussion process. There is the Developer of Luray Landing, who needs to coordinate this stuff with the Airport Commission, the Town of Luray, Page County, and the various state and federal agencies who are concerned about storm water management and airports. What really came out is that there are too many people involved who aren’t all in the same room at the same time. The resolution on this was to direct the developer to coordinate with Mark Belton and come to an agreement with the Airport Commission.

Alice’s Opinion on this is: Who is going to buy a house crammed into a subdivision stuck between Wal-Mart and an airport, when there is all this beautiful land out here that you can quick grab while the By-Right subdivisions are still legal? See the Blog on By-Right Subdivisions, coming later.