Longmont’s prairie dog solution a bad joke

May 19, 11:29 AMDenver Aviation ExaminerChris Rodriguez

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In the FoxNews report in my previous story, it said the City of Longmont “planned to spend up to $14,000 to build a new barrier fence” to keep prairie dogs out of the airport movement area.  The fence is built, and I thought you might like to see where and how your money was spent.    You know what they say about how you should hold on to your wallet when talking about governments?  In this case, due to laughter, hold on to your stomachs…
 

Follow along with the captions in the Slideshow at the bottom of this screen.

Talk about government fraud, waste, and abuse.  When I went out and looked at this fence I seriously was asking myself "is this someone's idea of a joke?"   While this was being built, did anyone actually think it was going to do any good at all?  This money could have been spent on a much needed restroom at the airport, but instead is wasted on this? 

Fellow pilots and aviation enthusiasts, take note of how to get it all wrong.  Let the fiasco at our airport be used as an example in your own communities on how not to allow a micro-managing bureaucracy of incompetents with little to no aviation knowledge run roughshod over an airport.  It’s not as if they weren’t warned by their own Airport Advisory Board, they were.  It’s not as if they weren’t warned by the FAA and the flying community, they were. 

They listened more to their mostly aviation-ignorant “activists” and less to common sense and safety considerations.  That tells me they are more than willing to violate contracts with Federal and State aviation divisions and put this fine airport out of compliance.  Would that mean the city would have to pay back some of those grants equaling more than $3 million?  Of course, they budget as well as they run an airport – meaning, they don’t have anywhere close to the money to pay back a fraction of those grants.

How do your city leaders treat/run your airport?  Ours is now a national embarrassment.

• For another view of this situation, check out this story from the always awesome (and my wife to boot) Longmont Examiner.