STOP THENOISE

Courts rule Nuisance is a State Matter
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Mass Nuisance Lawsuit Settled
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Airport Expansion

The Airport Improvement Program

The Airport Improvement Program is the reason the people most often lose when trying to rein in a local airport. FAA gives money in the form of grants to publicly-owned airports. This money may be for any purpose FAA sees fit to support such as runway extension, new hangers or terminals, or a control tower. With this money comes strings, more like chains, that enslave the community to the FAA. These are these are the dreaded AIP grant obligations.

The AIP grant obligations are a mechanism by which today's politicians can bind a community to decades of servitude to the FAA. And one can be sure that before the current obligations expire, FAA will be back with another box of money with which to entice a new airport commission or county government to enter into further obligations. These obligations override the will of the people. If a community should decide to close an airport or to limit its operations, the aviation industry, usually led by AOPA, will get the FAA to step in and enforce the draconian provisions of the AIP grant obligations.

This is not federal preemption as many people often claim it to be. FAA can not regulate how a community manages its airport, or how a private individual or corporation operates a private airport. What happens is that FAA gets the courts to enforce the contractual obligations incurred by the community when it accepted the grant. In the absence of these grant obligations, the FAA and its owners , the aviation industry, are powerless before the community interests.

The solution then is obvious. Don't accept AIP grant money, Don't incur grant obligations. Control your destiny.

There are a number of things we can do to fix this corrupt program. They all involve changes to the law; so they first require honest men and women in the lawmaking positions.

1. In each state pass a law requiring that no entity may incur AIP grant obligations without first receiving approval in the form of ballot question requiring a 2/3 majority for approval. This ballot question must be presented to the voters affected by the airport seeking the AIP money.
    
2. At the federal level, the laws providing for the AIP program must be amended such that any community may get out of its AIP grant obligations by simply paying back the grant.
    
3. The federal AIP  system should be dismantles and abolished. After all, if airports are the financial boon to a community that the aviation industry is always claiming one is, then the local community should be able AND WILLING to fund any 'improvements' the local folk chose to. The federal government then won't have to take money from the poor financially challenged communities and redistribute it to the already better-off communities that have airports.
    
4. The FAA currently has a pilot program to provide AIP-like funding, with the attendant grant obligations to private airports if a local government sponsor co-signs. This is a thinly-veiled attempt to extend the reach of FAA to protect these private airports so that they may be grown into larger and nosier airports in the future. This is vitally important because new airports are not being built. They can't get permits. So the industry and FAA have conspired to make airports immune from local zoning, environmental, and nuisance laws. If they continue to have their way, these airports will grow like uncontrollable cancers within their communities.

Remember. Not all airports are bad. What is bad is when then FAA and the aviation industry conspire to deny the local governments and the local people their right to control an environmentally unfriendly and irresponsible industry within their community.

AOPA, of course, sees the program as necessary to maintain control of these airports.