Palo Alto airport, potential long-term problems...

I was just forwarded this from my flying club. They've decided to stop
accepting FAA funding, along with its 20 year strings to keep the
airport open.

==========================


from Heather Wagner and your club scheduler at
http://www.AircraftClubs.com/ ...

From: Peter Carpenter
To: "Bob Lenox"

Subject: Updated Action Plan for June 6 Palo Alto City Council meeting
regarding the future of PAO -added Transportation Master Plan info
Sent: Friday, June 3, 2005 9:13 AM

The Palo Alto City Manager has refused to co-sign a grant
application for Federal funds for the Palo Alto Airport. This decision
has profound financial and long term implications for the airport.

Background:

Palo Alto has had an airport for more than 80 years. The first
airport was on Stanford land, the second near Embarcadero, the third at
the site of the present Golf Course and then it was moved to its
current location and significantly down sized in order to allow the
building of the Golf Course.
The land is owned by the City of Palo Alto and is leased to the County
of Santa Clara for the operation of the Airport. The 50 year lease
agreement between the City and County for the operation of the Palo
Alto airport expires in 2017. All FAA grants require a 20 year
assurance. Since the lease expiration date is only 12 years off, the
City of Palo Alto must agree that the airport will continue in
operation beyond the current lease time frame. Who and how the airport
operates is not material, simply that the it will continue as an
airport. The Palo Alto City Manager has just refused to cosign the most
recent grant application.

As a part of Palo Alto's transportation and recreation infrastructure,
the airport requires periodic maintenance and updating. The money that
was being applied for is generated by fees paid for by users, coming
from the FAA's Airport Improvement Program funds. The grant application
was for pilot actuated lighting, new weather reporting equipment, and
some fencing upgrades. The City Manager, by his refusal to cosign the
grant application, has caused the cancellation of the current grant
request and jeopardizes Federal grants already received. As much as $2
Million has been lost by the City Manager's decision. No city or
general taxpayer money is at stake here.

The airport is an important part of our community, valued not only as a
business and recreational facility that helps make Palo Alto a special
place, but also recognizing the economic benefits the infrastructure
allows. The airport is specifically included as an essential element of
the long standing Palo Alto Baylands Master Plan. The Transportation
Master Plan of the City of Palo Alto, available at
http://www.cityofpaloalto.org/compplan/transport.html, states this
policy
T-57:
"Support the continued vitality and effectiveness of the Palo Alto
Airport
without significantly increasing its intensity or intruding into
open space
areas. The Airport should remain limited to a single runway and
two fixed
base operators."
Palo Alto also has a long standing mutual sharing agreement with
Sunnyvale that Sunnyvale will provide Palo Alto with waste disposal
facilities in return for Palo Alto providing a local airport. The City
Manager did not consult with Sunnyvale regarding his unilateral
decision to abrogate that Council approved agreement nor did he consult
with the Palo Alto City Council regarding his decision to act contrary
to the Council approved Baylands Master Plan. The City Manager did not
consult with the public, with the airport community or even the City
sponsored Joint Community Relations Committee for the Palo Alto Airport
regarding his decision. This unilateral action by the City Manager and
his comments to the press that Palo Alto has no interest in the airport
threaten the long term existence of the Palo Alto Airport and have
seriously jeopardized, if not destroyed, any trust that might have
existed between the airport community and the City Manager.

Just as years ago the decision not to dredge lead inevitably to the
closure of the Palo Alto Yacht Harbor, this decision to reject Federal
funding to maintain and improve the airport has started us down the
same path. Unless the airport community rises up en masse to protest
this shortsighted, unwise and unauthorized decision by a City Manager
(who should be concerned with preserving City assets and managing a
deficit budget rather than turning away Federal funds) there will not
be a lease extension or an alternative long term stewardship for the
airport and the airport will be allowed to slowly deteriorate until it
will eventually no longer be functional.

This is not an idle threat -- unless we act NOW the City Manager has
started down a road towards closure of the Palo Alto Airport. Rumor has
it that he wants the airport land for other uses -- fortunately it is
not his land.


City Council:
The City Council's next meeting is June 6 at 250 Hamilton Ave. and it
begins at 7 PM. Each meeting opens with public comments and each
speaker is allowed 3 minutes to speak. Please arrive a few minutes
early to fill out a speaker's card which must be given to the City
Clerk. After all the airport advocates have spoken and the Council gets
ready to move on to its regular agenda, the airport advocates should
stand up and leave en masse to demonstrate our numbers. Please plan on
attending and speaking at this meeting. Please pass this message on to
all of your airport friends. Bring your family and neighbors. Be
polite, concise, respectful and resolved. (I will unfortunately be
attending a meeting, of the United States International University
-Kenya Board on which I serve, in Nairobi on the 6th, so I rely on the
rest of you to carry the torch.)

What the Council needs to see is righteous indignation by a lot of
people for the City Manager's decision not to co-sign the grant
application, for his total failure to consult with anybody and for his
failure to understand the importance of the Palo Alto Airport.


It is vital that all members of the airport community express their
personal views on this issue.
This will be democracy in action -- each person should speak their own
mind and from their own script, but speak we must. Our silence or
absence will be a clear sign of acquiescence to the City Manager's
decision.


The Council should be urged to pass a resolution endorsing the long
term existence of the airport, as affirmed in the Baylands Master Plan
and as embodied in the regional services agreement between Palo Alto
and Sunnyvale ( Palo Alto will provide an airport and Sunnyvale will
provide a waste management facility), and directing the City Manager to
figure out who is going to run the airport -- the County or a new
Special District or whatever.


Draft Resolution The Palo Alto
City Council hereby reaffirms, consistent with the Baylands Master Plan
and Palo Alto's regional sharing agreement(s), that the Palo Alto
Airport is an essential long term transportation and recreational
component of Palo Alto's infrastructure and that no actions which
adversely impact the Palo Alto Airport shall be taken without Council
approval.

Purely from a strategic point of view --

A. The City Council may NOT reply to any of your comments if this item is
not on the published agenda. Doing so violates the State Open Meeting Law
(Brown Act) which states that any item not on the agenda may not be
discussed. Don't expect answers ... they can't give them.

B. The most you can hope for is for the Chair or Mayor (whichever form of
council you have) to direct the Clerk to put this item on the NEXT agenda.
If the Mayor is contacted prior to the meeting (perfectly legal so long as
you don't call a majority of the Council individually -- meeting seriatum)
you may be able to extract a promise to hold a special meeting IF this item
is time critical. Time critical implies some sort of a deadline that won't
wait until the next regular meeting. The fact that you want it done NOW
doesn't count for squat.

C. HOWEVER, if there are a few dozen of you, each of you can call up to (a
majority minus one) of the council members individually and express your
concerns prior to the meeting. (half minus one goes like this -- if there
are seven voting members on the council, you may call three. If there are
five you can call two, and so on.)

D. Getting up and leaving en masse is the worst advice you can be given.
It signals to the Council that you are going to take your toys and go home.
You don't give a damn about anything but your little playtoy airport. Don't
send that message. If the stuff on the agenda is boring as snot (the normal
run of events) you won't be noticed if you get up slowly one by one and
filter out quietly.

E. Numbers DO count. Each of those folks up there want to be reelected and
next year is reelection year for half of them. Don't bring in your friends
from East Undershirt to testify. They want to know that you are a voter for
them. The best way to do that is to say in a clear voice that "My name is
John Jones and my registered voting address is 1234 Goober Street, Palo
Alto" -- and THEN launch into your spiel. Don't BOTHER speaking if you
can't identify yourself as a voter OF THIS COUNCIL district.

E. If you can arrange it beforehand, pick a thrust issue (the deal with
Sunnyvale? the economic impact on the Palo Alto economy?) and have each
person touch on that issue before launching into their personal spiel.

Jay Honeck, you've just been down this road with YOUR council. Anything to
add?

Jim




City Council:
The City Council's next meeting is June 6 at 250 Hamilton Ave. and it
begins at 7 PM. Each meeting opens with public comments and each
speaker is allowed 3 minutes to speak. Please arrive a few minutes
early to fill out a speaker's card which must be given to the City
Clerk. After all the airport advocates have spoken and the Council gets
ready to move on to its regular agenda, the airport advocates should
stand up and leave en masse to demonstrate our numbers. Please plan on
attending and speaking at this meeting. Please pass this message on to
all of your airport friends. Bring your family and neighbors. Be
polite, concise, respectful and resolved.

Draft Resolution The Palo Alto
City Council hereby reaffirms, consistent with the Baylands Master Plan
and Palo Alto's regional sharing agreement(s), that the Palo Alto
Airport is an essential long term transportation and recreational
component of Palo Alto's infrastructure and that no actions which
adversely impact the Palo Alto Airport shall be taken without Council
approval.

RST Engineering wrote:

Don't BOTHER speaking if you
can't identify yourself as a voter OF THIS COUNCIL district.

And don't try one of those "clever" little speeches. Like asking if it's true
they want to replace the airport with a Wal-Mart. It doesn't go over well (and
it might give them ideas).

George Patterson
Why do men's hearts beat faster, knees get weak, throats become dry,
and they think irrationally when a woman wears leather clothing?
Because she smells like a new truck.

Jay Honeck, you've just been down this road with YOUR council. Anything to
add?

Well, not *quite* the same train of events happened out here in Corn
Country.

Our City Council (through the City Manager) was trying to
disenfranchise our independent airport commission, under the guise of
"helping the airport."

We saw through those smoke and mirrors right away. Anyone with a
brain stem realized instantly that the ONLY thing protecting our (too
close to town) airport from development was an independent commission,
made up of people dedicated to the future of the airport. The first
step toward closing the airport HAD to be the removal of this obstacle,
and we determined to stop them at that point.

So we organized a grass roots effort to "convince" the City Council of
the folly of their plans. (In truth, I don't think they had thought it
through, and I believe that they were just following the city manager's
lead.)

Step One was forming the "Friends of Iowa City Airport" advocacy group.
Primarily an email list of supporters, this group -- over 170 strong
-- was able to exert enormous pressure at the most critical times, both
"in-person" and through letter writing.

Step Two was to attend every Airport Commission and City Council
meeting. Most of our civil servants are used to working in relative
privacy (cable TV notwithstanding), and when a bunch of guys wearing
AOPA hats suddenly started showing up at meetings, they took notice.

Step Three was to find a champion. We found (or he found us?) a very
eloquent guy on the airport commission (who happened to be a rising
star at the University -- the 600 pound gorilla around Iowa City) who
was able to articulate the reasons behind maintaining an independent
airport commission to our city council members. This was critical,
since no one had ever bothered to explain any of the arcane
machinations of an airport to these folks -- most of whom were much
more interested in Iowa City's "historic preservation" or declaring
Iowa City to be a "nuclear-free zone"...

All three of these steps need to be followed by your group, pronto.
This needs to be highlighted in the newspapers, covered by local radio,
and brought up to AOPA. Make noise!

We were able to save our airport commission (at least, until the
monster arises from the dead yet again -- you never REALLY beat these
things) by using these time-honored techniques.
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

"j" == jacobowitz writes:

j What the Council needs to see is righteous indignation by a lot
j of people

And that will do what?

j It is vital that all members of the airport community express
j their personal views on this issue. This will be democracy in
j action -- each person should speak their own mind and from
j their own script, but speak we must. Our silence or absence
j will be a clear sign of acquiescence to the City Manager's
j decision.

Oooohhh! Aaawwww! Wow, democracy in action!

Pardon my cynicism. You guys are so naive that if it weren't an
airport I'd be LMAO.

IF you are *really* serious about keeping KPAO--and you should be,
it's a nice airport--you need to get educated ASAP about how politics
*really* works. I'm not the guy to do it, but I know someone who can
point you in the right direction.

My guess is you don't really want to figure this out. It's a lot
preferable to huff and puff publically, tell each other you did the
best you could, and cry over a beer after you fly your planes
somewhere else. Invariably people don't really want advice, they
simply want affirmation of a course of action they've already decided
on.

I really only meant to post the message as an alert to other people in
the area. If it wasn't clear from the attributions withing the text; I
did not write it myself.

That said, I am a user of PAO, a popular, heavily-used field. However,
I do not live in the city of Palo Alto, so have no real legal standing.
Perhaps there are people on this board who live in PA and want to get
involved.

-- dave j


Bob Fry wrote:
"j" == jacobowitz writes:

j What the Council needs to see is righteous indignation by a lot
j of people

And that will do what?

j It is vital that all members of the airport community express
j their personal views on this issue. This will be democracy in
j action -- each person should speak their own mind and from
j their own script, but speak we must. Our silence or absence
j will be a clear sign of acquiescence to the City Manager's
j decision.

Oooohhh! Aaawwww! Wow, democracy in action!

Pardon my cynicism. You guys are so naive that if it weren't an
airport I'd be LMAO.

IF you are *really* serious about keeping KPAO--and you should be,
it's a nice airport--you need to get educated ASAP about how politics
*really* works. I'm not the guy to do it, but I know someone who can
point you in the right direction.

My guess is you don't really want to figure this out. It's a lot
preferable to huff and puff publically, tell each other you did the
best you could, and cry over a beer after you fly your planes
somewhere else. Invariably people don't really want advice, they
simply want affirmation of a course of action they've already decided
on.

In article .com,
wrote:

I really only meant to post the message as an alert to other people in
the area. If it wasn't clear from the attributions withing the text; I
did not write it myself.

That said, I am a user of PAO, a popular, heavily-used field. However,
I do not live in the city of Palo Alto, so have no real legal standing.
Perhaps there are people on this board who live in PA and want to get
involved.

I used to live in the South Bay area and based at PAO. The political
problem there is that Palo Alto politics is overrun by eco-freaks, who
hate cars and airplanes. This problem spill over into Sunnyvale and
Mountain View, too.

Compounding the problem is severe pressure by developers to devour every
square foot of "available" land (airports represent a lot of this kind
of land to them). This is the overriding political problem with allowinf
civil use of Moffett, which would alleviate a lot of the airport space
problem in Silicon Valley.

--
Remove _'s from email address to talk to me.