The Santa Fe Municipal Airport has been at the center of any number of Santa Fe-style arguments over the years - usually between neighbors, who hate the noise of planes and helicopters taking off or landing overhead, and aviation enthusiasts who see the airport as one of the city's most underestimated assets.
The neighbors have lost most of these battles, mainly because the agencies with the most clout at the airport are state and federal rather than local. The National Guard built a big hangar and a military contractor tested helicopter-airplane hybrids at the airport despite hue and cry from the neighbors about noise.
And over the past several years, the airport enthusiasts have been working steadily - with federal dollars - to get the airport upgraded to Class 1 status so that it can be authorized to receive regular commercial service from other area cities. The service will involve small regional jets.
Ironically, all the fuss may soon be moot as a result of an unusual combination: public apathy and prairie dogs.
The public at large is apparently so lukewarm about the prospect of flying directly into Santa Fe (as opposed to landing at the Albuquerque Sunport and then taking the I-25 north) that the number of passengers using our airport has barely topped the federal threshold for allowing any commercial service in recent years. This year, the passenger count may well fall below the threshold. As a result, the Federal Aviation Administration may yank the airport's commercial service status. (Airport director Jim Montman says the airport is caught in a Catch-22 - the passenger count is low because present commercial service is inadequate, yet if the airport served more passengers and qualified for better service, it could easily meet the commercial service threshold.)
And then there are the prairie dogs. These ubiquitous critters have taken over any number of Santa Fe parks and school athletic fields. Now they're wreaking havoc at the airport. They've pockmarked the unpaved emergency areas at the end of runways so badly that the FAA has put airport managers on notice they must figure out a "long-term solution" to the problem by November.
We'll see what happens.
Copyright 2005 LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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