Anyone who said working in municipal government is easy obviously must have never had to decide whether to allow a burgeoning business to land sky divers in their city’s only off-leash dog park.
Such was the conundrum thrust upon the city of Durango by Bruce Odiorne, a licensed pilot and flight instructor who founded two new ventures, Durango Flight Tours and Sky-dive Durango earlier this year.
While Durango Flight Tours has both figuratively and literally taken off, no one has yet to jump out of Odiorne’s cherry-red 1958 Cessna 182 for lack of one thing: a place to land.
Attempting to overcome that hiccup, Odiorne approached the city of Durango earlier this summer requesting permission to land sky divers in Durango’s Off-Leash Dog Park.
Odiorne explained to city officials in an email: “We will then shuttle the people back to Animas Airpark. They will only hang out in the dog park for a few minutes. We don’t need any special equipment and that landing zone is huge for our purposes.”
To bolster his proposal, Odiorne pointed out that paragliders regularly jump from the cliffs of Smelter Mountain and descend into the off-leash area.
Additionally, Odiorne said it has been well litigated that liability for sky diving accidents almost always falls on the sky diver, or rarely the sky diving company, and hardly ever the owners of wherever sky divers return to Earth.
“This has been known for a long time, if you jump out of an airplane, the liability’s on you, because you just jumped out of the airplane,” Odiorne said.
Durango Assistant Parks Director Scott McClain said no one had ever made a request quite like Odiorne’s during his time with the city, so discussions had to happen with several city departments, including the Durango Police Department and Durango-La Plata County Airport.
McClain said officials from the airport compared Odiorne’s proposal to other sky diving operations in the region, for example, Skydive Moab just over the state line in Moab, Utah.
According to Korey Yost, a member of Skydive Moab’s ground team, almost all of Skydive Moab’s sky divers land near the same place where they took off – a wide-open field next to Canyonlands Regional Airport.
“Most drop zones have the landing area right there at the airport,” Yost said.
Conversely, the Durango Off-Leash Dog Park is flanked by four lanes of U.S. Highway 160 on one side and the slopes of Smelter Mountain on the other, raising safety concerns among Durango-La Plata County Airport officials, McClain said.
Relatedly, McClain said Durango Police Department officials expressed concerns over the lack of emergency service accessibility to the off-leash area, something that would be needed in the event of a sky diver accidentally skimming Smelter Mountain during descent or suffering a hard landing.
According to McClain, however, incompatibility with the off-leash area’s intended use, forcing dog walkers to compete for space with sky divers, was the ultimate reason Odiorne’s proposal was rejected.
“Sky diving sounds like a neat activity,” McClain said. “But to provide for a private business and take away from services we were delivering to other people just did not feel like the right thing to do.”
McClain agreed with Odiorne’s argument that liability for the city wasn’t a major concern but countered his point about paragliders, saying the majority of paragliding occurs early in the morning, negating most land-use conflict with dog walkers.
Although his off-leash area landing zone proposal never grew wings, Odiorne has not given up on his Skydive Durango dreams.
Recently, a property owner tentatively agreed to allow Odiorne to land sky divers in a field near the Animas Air Park where Odiorne takes off, for which he is now seeking Federal Aviation Administration approval.
“I think this tourism aspect of Durango is why Durango is so successful,” Odiorne said. “There’s zip lining, adventure tours, multiple rafting companies – it just makes sense with our community that sky diving is something that would fit in.”
nmetcalf@durangoherald.com
