That's not a bad idea. One of the oddities of our airport is that its
owned by the people that live at the airport. The apron area is divided
up and owned by several people. It's not unsual for the guy next to you
to pay a different owner for his tie down fees than you. The runway
itself is divided up into slivers, which are then owned by the home
owners at the airpark. As a result, the only way to shut down the
airport would be if the state changed the zoning out from under us
(very unlikely). Cal trans could (in theory) take our operating permit
but they only have authority to do that if the airport itself is out of
compliance with safety requirements. Since there is no county or city
board that operates it, we have some protection. However, we've never
taken AIP funds, and I suspect that we may not be able to because of
the private ownership. We did recently get state funds though because
we are public use. We used it to level the tie down areas. Now you can
preflight and not fall down.

It's interesting that so many small, little airports have AWOS's now,
it can't be totally prohibitive.

-Robert