Funding the true catch with airport

If anything would prevent us from forwarding the airport master plan to the Federal Aviation Administration, it wouldn't be the lack of an environmental impact study or the use of a fire tanker as a critical aircraft or even that an approved airport project isn't included.

It would be that someone expects the federal government to give us $27 million to complete the plan. Even as they were approving the plan, county commissioners expressed their doubts about the availability of funding.

When plans to expand the east side of the airport were first suggested, we lived in a different world. The chief source of funding for airport expansion is a 7.5 percent tax on airline tickets, very few of which are purchased in Minden.

But as competition increases for limited resources, the chances that we're going to receive one-and-a-half times the $18 million in federal money we'd received in the past are slim.

Plans that involve the federal government often have that wish-list quality, lately. The state's Highway 395 corridor study, which envisions widening Highway 395 to six lanes and building a bunch of overpasses is one example.

The thing in the sky above Carson Valley that concerns us is not the number of jets, or gliders, or fire tankers, but the pie.