Airport 2006: Fly Us  

By Nancy Klingener

As a member of the local press, I feel we, collectively, owe the public an apology.

When it comes to the new $28-million Key West airport terminal, we fell down on the job. (Does anyone think that price tag is NOT going to increase?)

A new terminal for Key West is a long-held dream of various county officials and, no doubt, some of the folks who work there. Our terminal is old and, for its current usage, cramped.

But the thing is, as a community, we like it. We like the casual informality of it, the walk-out-the-door-to-the-car nature of it, the island feel to it.

There was an earlier effort to replace the terminal, in the early 1990s. Solares Hill, then under the editorship of David Ethridge, was at the forefront of the battle to stop that plan which would have replaced the terminal with a building that resembled an upscale shopping center. Miraculously, with some courage on the part of the County Commission, it was stopped. The county even managed to add some long-overdue amenities, like air conditioning and extra space for the car rental agencies.

Then came Sept. 11. New security requirements were jammed into the tight space, lines to pass through our single security gate started snaking out the door. There is no air conditioning outside for the security line and no bathroom inside the departure lounge. Regional jets with larger passenger capacities started flying here and that led to crowded conditions in our one and only departure gate.

Now, the county declared, we had no choice. The new terminal was coming and the decision was made with no outcry like the one that had stopped the terminal a decade before. The first mention I can find in The Citizen archives is a story from May, 2004, about major capital projects in the pipeline. And this one is even grander, a big structure that will occupy the area where the parking lot once stood. Our old terminal will become a departure gate.

County Airport Director Peter Horton presented the plans to the Chamber of Commerce in April 2005. "Revenge will be mine — I will build this new terminal before I die," Horton said. He was kidding, sort of. Horton likes to speak in un-bureaucratic terms; he has also been known to refer to battles over runway extension vs. Salt Ponds protection as "an environmental Vietnam."

I remember editing that story about Horton's presentation and thinking, this is one of those cases where people are going to be really mad when the actual work starts. But when you're in a daily newspaper position, it's not your job to incite public displeasure. You should, however, provide the information that allows the public to understand what's coming at them.

(A similar story is unfolding with the new Jewfish Creek Bridge, which is surprising many drivers with its size as it rises on the 18-Mile Stretch — the least surprised is probably John Hammerstrom, a Key Largo airline pilot and environmental activist who not only knew this thing would be out of scale for the Keys but even made an image using the project dimensions to show just how huge it was. His efforts, as we can see now, were for naught but the sour satisfaction of being able to say "I told you so.")

Back to the airport. Now that the project is underway, totally apart from the county's troubles with its "contractor apparently not really at risk" contract, the public is finding itself upset about the loss of convenient — or sufficient — parking at the airport and the cost and size of the new McCoy Terminal.

I don't think we can say "I told you so," because apparently we didn't tell you so in a way that people truly understood what they were getting. All of us, the press and the public, need to do better at listening to alert citizens like Hammerstrom and paying attention when projects first come out of the gate.

A lot of people who are unhappy about the new terminal are especially unhappy that it will be named, in part, after County Commissioner and former Key West Mayor Charles "Sonny Boy" McCoy (that's the name on his Christmas cards this year, our 78-year-old Sonny Boy). Perhaps he really does have a boyish spirit with his boyish pranks such as pushing a panic button just to see how long it would take sheriff's deputies to respond.

One could argue the McCoy Terminal simultaneously honors Sonny's wife, the late Merili McCoy, who was a city commissioner and was without doubt fiercely devoted to her island home. Only Sonny Boy, a licensed pilot, is the one with the link to aviation and to county government, which is running this boondoggle.

Keys institutions might want to take a cue from Miami-Dade County which learned, back when it was Dade County, that naming anything after anyone who is still alive is a dangerous enterprise. They learned that up in Dade after they named a street after a guy named Leonel Martinez ... before learning that a big chunk of the wealth behind Mr. Martinez' civic philanthropy came from smuggling drugs.

Not that any of our current living heroes with buildings named after them, who include FKCC President William Seeker (the main campus on Stock Island) and Sheriff Rick Roth (a building at the college and Upper Keys county offices), are suspected of nefarious doings. But you just never know what someone can get up to. And if you honor people after they're dead, then you know you're doing it to honor their good works and not to feed their egos.

The county could solve this problem with the McCoy Terminal by canceling the project, giving us back our parking lot and extending the current terminal to accommodate a larger departure area and maybe even two security gates. It would probably cost less than $28 million. But don't bet on it.

The most interesting story of the week, if you're into the growth management follies, was in Wednesday's Citizen. There it was revealed that the governor's office is reviewing the report of the Dec. 5 Cabinet meeting where County Administrator Tom Willi assured the governor and Cabinet members that an 18-hour evacuation plan for the Keys was in the county's land-use plan and had been thoroughly vetted in public hearings.

The 18-hour evacuation time, a sudden six-hour drop from the previous estimate, was the result of one scenario in the South Florida Regional Planning Council's latest take on evacuating the Keys, which is simultaneously our plan for preventing widespread fatalities in the prospect of a killer storm and the underpinning of our growth management system. You can't build homes for more people than can safely get out of here in 24 hours, so if the evacuation estimate is 18 hours, that opens the door for a whole lot more development.

And it sure wasn't the subject of public hearings because you can be sure we have members of the public who would have made some noise about it if it had been.

There are several truly shocking things about this story. There's the county's top official standing in front of the governor and Cabinet and saying things that, according to county documents and most people involved, are just not true. But the most egregious might be the behavior of the Department of Community Affairs, the state's growth management agency.

The county, under its current regime, might be expected to push the envelope in the effort to increase development. But DCA has the responsibility, under the Keys' status as an Area of Critical State Concern, of keeping the county honest and telling the governor and Cabinet what's really going on down here.

Instead, DCA appears to be aiding and abetting, if not leading the way, in the effort to push the interpretation of one hurricane evacuation scenario — which only takes us as far as Tavernier and makes all kinds of other best-case assumptions. The nicest term I can come up with for interpretation is moving the goalposts. The term for DCA's behavior is abdication of responsibility. The consequences, in hurricane evacuation and development, are enormous.

Fortunately for the county (or maybe this was part of the calculation?), Gov. Bush is in his final weeks in office. I don't know the governor personally but I've been to a few Cabinet meetings and certainly followed his actions in office in the press and my guess is he's a guy who doesn't take well to being misled, especially under direct questioning. I've never heard of a case like this, where his office has to go back and fact-check those who testified before him.

It will be interesting to see how far he chooses to pursue it at this late date, and more interesting to see how our new governor, Charlie Crist, approaches the matter. Traditionally, the Keys have been the area of the state where state and national politicians can go green without political cost. But we don't know yet who really has Crist's ear on these matters.

nklingener@keysnews.com