Edmonton voters should seize on the opportunity afforded by a plebiscite over the proposed closure of the City Centre Airport to put an end to the plan and instead insist city leaders adopt a more forward-looking approach to priceless transportation infrastructure.
The city has been grappling for years with the complexities of having two airports. What many major centres would see as a blessing - a small but vital downtown airport complementing the major but more distant international airport - has posed endless problems for Edmonton. The case for closure of the downtown airport is predicated on two pieces of accepted wisdom:
that the City Centre Airport, despite drastic past measures to constrict its use, continues to stand in the way of Edmonton International Airport becoming a major air hub, and
that the City Centre Airport lands can be redeveloped into a residential Shangri-La, a green residential community that would spring up like so many mushrooms after a heavy rain next to the city's under-populated downtown.
The first piece of wisdom should have been abandoned after scheduled passenger service was removed from the City Centre Airport, and the International still failed to become the kind of major hub many had hoped for.
The second is even more tenuous, with the claims for the regenerative potential of the airport lands eerily echoing those once made for the former rail lands in Edmonton's downtown.
When a previous council voted to rid the city of its downtown rail "moose pasture," along with any future commuter or high-speed rail service to the city centre, it did so in favour of a vision of a veritable jewel of downtown redevelopment. Instead it got a series of strip malls that essentially killed off long stretches of nearby Jasper Avenue, along with a low-rise condo, a casino and, on the bright side, a downtown campus for Grant MacEwan University (which could, of course, have just as easily occupied one of the extant parking lots elsewhere downtown).
Some 80,000 Edmontonians have signed a petition to force a plebiscite during the municipal elections. They should follow it up with a vote to preserve the City Centre Airport.