Over the last four years, the La Plata Economic Development Alliance has met with nearly 150 businesses, from people working in their homes to our largest employers. Businesses of all sizes and types cited the internet, room for expansion, and air service as important to their success.
National research has shown that air service is critical for rural Rocky Mountain communities like ours. A recent study from Colorado State University on the Durango-La Plata County Airport confirmed this. Commercial air service contributes $119 million in income to county residents, generates almost $5 million annually in local taxes, and supports 1,900 good paying jobs in diverse fields such as construction, lodging, manufacturing, gas and oil, professional services, recreation, and retail. Additionally, 75 percent of registered voters in La Plata County use the airport two or more times per year. The CSU study found that those users save millions of dollars in driving expenses.
In short, commercial air service raises income, lowers the tax burden, saves money and supports good paying jobs for everyone in La Plata County.
But these benefits are at risk because our terminal is running at almost twice the capacity it was designed to handle. The 2016 Durango Airport Master Plan identified at least a dozen failure points around the terminal, including: no room to bring in a third airline to increase competition; a tarmac that is too small for the larger aircraft the airlines are deploying; delays caused by one de-icing facility and inadequate baggage handling areas; no storage space for aircraft parts, which sometimes cancels flights; and an undersized security area that can cause passengers to miss flights. These threaten our current air service and prevent us from pursuing new competition.
This election, we will see a ballot measure to fix the terminal’s deficiencies, create space to pursue better service and more competition, and enable the airport to self-pay any future expansions. Ballot Issue 1B will ask us to approve a small tax increase in order to help fund construction of a new, right-sized terminal and facilities that can safely handle five large aircraft at peak times on the east side of the runway.
How small is this tax increase? The Federal Aviation Administration and airport users from throughout the Four Corners will pay over half the cost of the new terminal and any future expansions. The local tax increase for the average homeowner and rancher will be less than $5 per month; the average business less than $40 per month. Our property taxes will remain the third lowest in the state. And 1B requires this small tax increase to end when the 20-year bonds are paid.
Our quality of life is better when we have a more diverse economy, our tax burden is low, and we can save money and time traveling. Our airport helps us accomplish those things. A “yes” vote on 1B for a new air terminal will ensure that we continue to benefit from good air service now and into the future.
Roger Zalneraitis is executive director of the La Plata Economic Development Alliance. Reach him at roger@yeslpc.com.
Our county commissioners, in a 2-1 vote, succumbed to lobbying pressure and agreed to put the question of a new airport terminal, financed by an increased property tax, on the November ballot. Later, I attended an information meeting in Ignacio, where Roger Zalneraitis, director of the La Plata County Economic Development Alliance, presented a dazzling array of statistics purporting to show how we will all benefit.
The first question that leaped to mind as I listened is an old one: Who pays the statistician? Here, my life-long experience with using statistics in science is a caution, about how multiple deliberate choices can skew your statistics: What questions to ask? What sample and sample-size to select? And ultimately: Who stands to benefit?
The Economic Development Alliance is a sales-pitch organ of the Durango business lobby, backed up primarily by the tourism-and-ski industry, and its siamese-twin, the real estate developers and sellers. The interests of this “alliance” are as clear as they are transformative: cramming a rural county with hordes of paying customers. They see your county and mine as an enticing source of ever-mounting profits. The rest is smoke and mirrors.
The sales pitch boils down to Trickle-Down Economics: You all benefit, suckers; the poor get new employment opportunities and better services – of which the proposed new airport is but the latest and most visible. But what benefits exactly? And at what unstated costs? Cut-throat traffic? No parking in downtown Durango? New jobs for educated outsiders? Paved-over ranch land? No affordable housing for working folks? Your county being taken over?
The most depressing thing about Western development, whose latest chapter is our proposed new airport, is how familiar it all is. John Wesley Powell saw it coming in the late 1870s. From then on, the story of “how the West was won” remains depressingly the same: Rapacious outside interests move in to reap exorbitant profits and then condescend to tell you what is in your best trickle-down interest.
It is puzzling but familiar, how a coalition of well-heeled big-business conservatives and educated, environmentally minded liberals have banded together to push for the proposed new airport. This is the same coalition that has been pushing for unbridled development and resource-extraction across the globe. A core premise of this coalition is that we all benefit. But a growing population of losers trail in the wake of this juggernaut. When poisonous mines, dense subdivisions and despoiled wilderness are left in the wake of “development,” the smart money moves on to peddle the next get-rich-quick scheme. The mirage of perpetual development and the “winning” of the West are but chapters in this sad saga.
Yes, I am told, but it is unavoidable, so why don’t you give up and join the wise crowd. Well sometimes I wish I could. Just once, I’d like to be on the winning side. But many people in La Plata County are the perennial losers of rapacious development. Someone – other than Donald Trump – needs to give voice to their perspective.
Tom Givón ranches near Ignacio and is currently working on a Western novel “West of Eden.” Reach him at tgivon@uoregon.edu or www.whitecloudpublishing.com.
