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closeProviding leadership can mean having to make some tough decisions.
Often, even when the decision is correct for the majority of people, a minority is harmed.
That is the case in Blaine, where the City Council voted earlier this week to sell the Blaine Airport property to two local investors for about $6 million.
The future of the airport has been a topic for debate in the city for decades. On the one hand, the airport was popular with some pilots of small planes. It also led to a handful of jobs for the businesses that supported those flights in industries such as airplane maintenance and refueling.
Still, many residents felt that it was unfair to ask them to subsidize the operation out of city general funds. In recent years the bill for operations, and to cover court costs involving the airport, took as much as $500,000 from city coffers that could have been used for something else.
And a study completed for the city showed the airport property, if redeveloped as an industrial and commercial site, could create as many as 332 new jobs in Blaine by 2025.
Given the financial struggles and the possibility of good new economic development, Blaine leaders did the right thing by voting to sell the airport.
In the deal struck last week, the city will receive $5,976,500 from Tom Hayes, president of T.C. Trading Co., and Patrick Rooney, a Blaine dentist, by the end of the year.
Between now and then, the pair will study the property, especially looking for potential environmental problems that could put a halt to the plan. They have 30 days to review the property with no obligation, but after that must put up $100,000 in earnest money that they could forfeit if the deal falls through.
Neither Hayes nor Rooney have said what they would do with the property. But the city has zoned the property for a mix of commercial, office and light industrial uses.
Hayes’ T.C. Trading Co. is a Blaine company that provides warehousing, distribution, freight forwarding and dry, cold and freezer storage services. So Hayes has experience in running and maintaining light industrial buildings.
We hope that the pair can create something that will fulfill the promise of the airport property and the hundreds of new jobs that could be created there. That kind of economic development would be the best economic news in Blaine in a generation.
We have sympathy for the small plane pilots and business interests who will be pushed out with the airport closure. We hope they can find a place at Bellingham International Airport or other, smaller, airports to continue with their passion and their businesses.
But in the end, the Blaine Airport case was one in which the needs of the many residents of the city outweighed the needs of the few.
Those kinds of public decisions are never easy to make. And the Blaine City Council should be congratulated for doing the right thing for the majority of the city’s citizens and for the future of the Blaine economy.
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