Airports are contentious. But this one’s been there a long time

Recently, a number of Washington County residents have been engaged in an organized effort to complain about the Lake Elmo Airport, its recently re-aligned runway, and the airport’s flight school. According to public statements in print and television reporting, the recent runway realignment and the current flight school are to blame for making life at their residences unbearable.

Airports are contentious. There are of course real effects upon communities surrounding any size airport, but not all residents in those communities are equally impacted. It is also true that airports have community value, with costs that can be both mitigated and absorbed. Working out who is impacted and what (if any) remedies are appropriate must be done within the history of the landscape.

In the case of the Lake Elmo Airport, the history of the landscape is simple and clear: The airport opened in 1951, with most residences in Baytown Township, West Lakeland Township and the east side of the City of Lake Elmo purchased on land adjacent to an existing airport. For many years the airport has been a sleeping giant. The airport was originally designed to handle heavy traffic, with four intersecting parallel runways, but has never experienced the need to expand to its full capacity. Over much of its history, it has been a lightly used airport, with only two of the four runways ever constructed.

The light use at the time of purchase may have allowed potential home buyers to discount the proximity of their land to the airport, but that was clearly a risk they simply chose to absorb. Recently, The Metropolitan Airports Commission chose to re-align the main runway 14-32, moving it from the location of the shorter parallel runway of the original design, to the location of the longer, never built, location. As part of a compromise with the community, the re-aligned runway was built shorter than the original design specified. The old runway was then converted to a taxiway, resulting in the airport still having only two runways.

It cannot be denied that the re-alignment changed the flight patterns of the airport and so necessarily changed the community. But the question that must be asked is this: Was this change unpredictable by those living near the airport, or is this a case where hope lead to extravagant optimism?

Over recent decades, there’s been an erosion of the phrase “caveat emptor.” Seems like one’s bad choices in life are always explained away as someone else’s fault. We no longer ask, “why did I do that?” but instead seem to turn to “why did this happen to me?”, even in the face of inevitable results.

I am not asking anyone to like living by a busy airport. Here in America, we are all free to choose where to live, and choosing to live far away from airports is a reasonable thing to do. The recent changes at the Lake Elmo airport have impacted some neighbors, and if they can show real economic damages, there are remedies available to them in the courts.

I am a 30+ year resident of Baytown Township and I have been a township supervisor for the last nine years. In full disclosure, I moved to Baytown in the 1990s explicitly to live near the Lake Elmo Airport. At that time, I had an airplane on lease-back with Mayer Aviation, which was the flight school on the airport for many years. I have not owned an airplane or hangar at the airport for the last 10 years, and I suspended my flying activities when I sold my plane.

Rick Weyrauch, Stillwater

Noise by the airport, loons by the lake

Years ago before MSP was an airport, it was a race track. People and farmers used to fly in to watch the races.

Then after time it evolved into a airport.

There has always been noise there.

You choose to live by noise when you move into the area.

Lake Elmo, no different, regardless of the new runway. It is called progress.

You build a home by the freeway, you are going to hear traffic noise.

If you build a home up north on a lake, you are going to hear loons.

Ed Siegfried, Farmington

How about it, recyclers?

After reading “Copper thefts darken St. Paul streets …” (Dec. 3) in the Pioneer Press, I find it downright absurd that this plague can’t be stopped. Absurd because we all know that if the recyclers didn’t buy, there would be no thefts.

I refuse to believe that the recyclers can’t tell the difference between a professional electrician or a contractor and a thief showing up with heavy-gauge copper wire. The recyclers will continue to buy as long as there is money to be made. If they wanted to help the City, I am convinced they most certainly could. A good beginning would be to take a picture of the sellers along with the materials for sale.

Hans Mouritzen, St. Paul

Yes, inflation hurts, but …

An opinion piece in the Dec. 12 issue of the Pioneer Press carried the headline “Voters are right to complain about inflation.” The article then points out that the economy is actually doing quite well and inflation has dropped dramatically. Nevertheless, prices for things, especially food, that we all need are much higher than they were before the pandemic hit.

The implication of the headline and article itself seems to suggest that changing who you vote for will change that. It won’t, and it certainly won’t bring back food prices to what they were in 2020. I guess the point is that inflation was caused by spending by the present administration. But that argument doesn’t explain why inflation is a worldwide problem with many countries experiencing much higher inflation than we do.

Some inflation will always be with us short of a depression. As an old man, I can remember when you could buy a bottle of Coca-Cola for five cents (Pepsi came out with a bottle twice the size and advertised with the ditty ending in “Twice as much for a nickel too. Pepsi cola is the drink for you.”) Clearly those days are gone forever.

Yes, the price inflation since 2020 hurts us all and especially those who struggle to make ends meet. But changing your vote won’t change that.

Paul Pallmeyer, Lake Elmo

Liz Cheney stands up

There are very few people that I would call an American hero, but right now Liz Cheney is one of them.

I am a liberal Democrat who never in my life would I have thought that I would call her a hero but times are dire and she has called out an American pariah and stood up to him.

She is fighting hard to save our democracy and her party; hopefully people of her party will hear her and help her save her party and our democracy by never reelecting Donald Trump.

Gregg Mensing, Roseville

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