EDITOR:
The voters have spoken. Question 1 passed, barely. Had 140 voters out of 21,000 voted the opposite it would have been defeated. But it wasn't.
So the county is free to proceed with its plans to expand our airport and I would expect it to do so. That's what this election was about.
But the County faces another important decision and how it proceeds with that will say a lot about the state of governance here. The new "airport use ordinance" actually contains an important blank that must be filled in and that is the future aircraft weight limit itself.
That's right, there is no weight limit. "Yes" voters repealed the old limit but have left it to the county to specify the new one and insert it into the ordinance. The argument was that the weight limit is a simple mathematical calculation and that it would be whatever those calculations say it should be.
But there is substantial disagreement among experts presumably qualified to make those calculations. The county's experts come up with relatively high numbers, while our local "citizen expert," an equally qualified engineer named Wayne Feree, comes up with a much lower result, one surprisingly close the to old voter approved weight limit we just repealed. Wayne explained his work in detail in a recent column in The R-C.
So the county faces a choice in the wake of this near 50/50 election.
It could view the results as a mandate to do what it pleases, go with its experts and insert a weight limit much higher than the one voters approved in the past. That would be the winner take all approach, simply ignoring half the voters here who clearly want stricter control of our airport.
Or the county could try to bridge the divide in our community over this issue, take Mr. Feree's work seriously and mount a campaign to have it accepted by the FAA as the basis for establishing and enforcing a weight limit very close to what voters approved in the past.
That would be what I'd call a "win-win" approach. The county could proceed with its plans for airport expansion but the half of the community that voted against Question 1 would get an enforceable weight limit more consistent with the "rural community airport" everyone says they want (even the proponents of Question 1 called themselves "Residents for a Rural Community Airport").
County leaders, like politicians everywhere, often speak of seeking consensus, working together, bridging divides and that sort of thing. Yet in the end often take a win-lose approach to governance.
The result is a community deeply divided on many important issues. The airport is simply the latest example.
Leaders now have an opportunity to put their rhetoric into practice in a concrete manner that would help bring folks together here instead of further dividing them. Will they take it? We'll soon know.
Terry Burnes
Gardnerville
