Blaine airport runway plan has wings clipped; forum to be canceled

A proposal to extend a runway at the Anoka County-Blaine Airport was temporarily grounded Thursday. Officials say the potential $12 million project could take years, needs a polished funding plan and must gain the approval of a skeptical public.

Anoka County officials scrambled to cancel a Dec. 2 public forum in which airport and county personnel were to field concerns about extending a runway from 5,000 to 6,000 feet. Commissioner Scott LeDoux, who heads the county's airport committee, said the meeting might be rescheduled for spring, but other officials said the meeting could be more than a year out.

Brad Kost, CEO and president of Key Air, the Connecticut-based company that has overseen a $35 million refurbishing of the reliever airport, said Thursday he did not want to rush a project that could cost between $7 million and $12 million. He acknowledged that extending the runway could "take years" and that "funding mechanisms" were not yet in place.

Kost, who was in Blaine on Thursday for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, said the runway extension would be for safety reasons only.

Before any runway extension could be done, a Federal Aviation Administration-approved study must be completed, and those studies take up to 18 months, said Gary Schmidt of the Metropolitan Airports Commission.

Complicating the issue is the "false information that's being spread - that Anoka will be inundated with cargo planes, that FedEx and UPS will be moving local operations to Anoka," said Schmidt, MAC's reliever airports expert. "That's not true. Even at 6,000 feet, the runway wouldn't be big enough for those planes. The rumors have gotten out of hand."

The Project Runway issue has divided the Anoka County Board and public opinion alike. Commissioner Rhonda Sivarajah has led a crusade against the runway extension, with LeDoux and the MAC's Schmidt accusing her Thursday of circulating a propaganda campaign via e-mail.

Sivarajah's widely circulated e-mail, a response to local resident Marc Schultz, talked about "devastating impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods and communities" that might result if a runway is extended beyond 5,000 feet, and of "unwanted traffic" and "cargo type traffic [that] could be diverted to Blaine."

Sivarajah also listed home and cell phone numbers of her fellow commissioners, encouraging others to call them. She suggested how to appeal to each and wrote that one commissioner, Jim Kordiak, lives in the southern portion of the county and "really has no interest" in the airport proposal. Sivarajah said Thursday that phone numbers that were included were copied from the county website.

As for her statement about cargo planes coming to the airport if the expansion were to happen, she said Thursday, "you may not have cargo in the short term, but you don't know about the future."

Commissioner Dick Lang and Sivarajah had chastised fellow commissioners for calling Tuesday's airport committee meeting without first notifying the entire County Board.

"If they [commissioners in favor of the plan] wanted a thoughtful discussion, they would not have attempted to put one by the citizens of Anoka County," Sivarajah said Thursday.

Building a 6,000-foot runway would elevate the airport's status to "intermediate," and invite larger planes. Kost adamantly denied Thursday that Key Air wants to extend a runway for the sake of luring bigger aircraft to Blaine.

"We want people in this area to be comfortable and we want this airport to be as safe as we can make it," Kost said Thursday. "We want to have a long-term impact on this community. Keeping the [airport] classification where it is, that's the compromise."

Extending the runway would have to be approved by the state. Fearing that an extended runway could be an invitation to larger planes, elevating the noise level and status of the airport, the Circle Pines City Council voted its opposition to the project last week. Blaine has officially taken a nonsupportive stance.