Why so much Burke hate out there? Burke Lakefront Airport (BKL) is just an airport—but the bizarre hatred of it—is blinding otherwise rational people into outlandish comments and behavior. Hatred—like love—can sometimes cause irrational thinking as we are witnessing with the obsession of closing Burke even though it will negatively impact Cleveland. Remediation of the toxic waste below the airport’s surface will likely cost between $500M and $1B and finding a developer willing to pay that on top of the cost of actual development (e.g., of a hotel or park) is unlikely, meaning closing the airport will do nothing but destroy our competitiveness and eliminate millions of dollars in annual economic activity from the city of Cleveland ($77M annually according to one of Bibb’s own studies) and bring us Garbage Dump 2.0.
In the past few days, Cleveland.com ran three (three!) separate anti-Burke pieces:
Dec 3: “ Me, me, me. Mine, mine, mine: Selfish Burke airport backers fight Cleveland’s lakefront dream” by “Today in Ohio,” a daily podcast by cleveland.com
Dec 8: “Shut it down! Burke Lakefront Airport has squatted on our shoreline long enough: Leila Atassi.” Leila Atassi is the “Public Interest and Advocacy editor” at cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
Dec 9: “Nobody gets a do-over like this:” Momentum builds to claim Cleveland’s lakefront from Burke” by “Today in Ohio,” a daily podcast by cleveland.com
We won’t dignify and respond to each nonsensical comment made in these articles, but a few are worthy of refuting since the city’s paper of record’s stories are clouded by hatred vs. presenting logical arguments.
From the first article above, “Me, me, me. Mine, mine, mine: Selfish Burke airport backers fight Cleveland’s lakefront dream”:
“This tiny group is just me, me, me, mine, mine, mine,” Chris Quinn said in condemning the group Tuesday. “All they’re thinking about is their little world and how it affects them without thinking about the bigger picture. There was a time when people would get together and say, you know, what? We should sacrifice this because there is a greater good.”
Chris Quinn—who is the editor of cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer—seems to fail to realize that the beneficiaries of Burke Lakefront are far greater than any “tiny group” of BKL users and tenants. Burke beneficiaries include the 10 million annual passengers at Hopkins who benefit as BKL keeps slower-moving and non-commercial traffic away from Hopkins thereby supporting safety of the flying public and on-time performance and congestion mitigation for commercial airlines. And by keeping Hopkins safe and timely, it keeps Cleveland as a competitive and attractive place for business and living. On a larger scale, Burke benefits 340M Americans as BKL serves an important part of the US national airspace system—as the largest—and not easily replaceable—reliever airport for Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Moreover, BKL serves the Cleveland Clinic which is not only the largest employer in Greater Cleveland, but a major driver of the local economy and helps keep Cleveland on the global map… So, closing Burke doesn’t just impact a “tiny group” as Chris Quinn suggests, but, in fact, affects essentially everybody in Cleveland (and the entire US air system).
In the second article, “Shut it down! Burke Lakefront Airport has squatted on our shoreline long enough” by PD/Cleveland.com editor Leila Atassi, Ms. Atassi makes several bizarre and nonsensical comments:
Her very second sentence says a lot: “That a shabby little airport has squatted on Cleveland’s most valuable waterfront for 78 years says less about the land’s limitations than our leaders’ lack of imagination.”
Burke is anything but shabby, but a very well-maintained and capable airport. And since Burke complies with all USDOT and FAA safety and operating requirements and is the hub of Cleveland Clinic’s global flight operations, she’s slamming USDOT and FAA, and, since the Clinic has chosen Burke over other airports, insulting the Clinic as well, that they chose to perform their ultra-time critical global operations at a shabby airport. Does she really mean to slam and insult Cleveland’s largest employer? Probably not, but her very second sentence compromises her article’s credibility and demonstrates her lack of understanding about Burke.
She says, Bibb’s “push [is] rooted in studies that project $92 million a year in economic activity if the site is redeveloped, compared with the nearly $1 million the airport loses annually today.” Perhaps she didn’t read the studies….
Page 2 – meaning she wouldn’t have had to read very much—of the Bibb’s own ESI study states, “The economic impact of airports extends far beyond their immediate operations. Currently, approximately $76.6 million of direct economic activity takes place at BKL annually. This activity includes airport operations, private passenger service, medical transport, flight training, and non-aviation related activity that uses the BKL for office space.” [bolding of text is our editing]
The $1M number she mentions refers to the negative net revenue at BKL for the airport to support the safe operations at Hopkins, which is why Hopkins operating funds support Burke operations. The $1M is not paid by taxpayers.
So, if anything, Ms. Atassi should be comparing $92M to $77M. But ultimately, on top of comparing apples to oranges, the $92M she cites is entirely hypothetical (vs. the very real and existing $77M) and ignores the actual cost of development, which, given the profound costs for environmental remediation required—estimated between $500M and over $1B—will likely never come to fruition.
She then says:
“The real question isn’t whether Burke is a good airport. It’s whether Burke is the best use of 450 lakefront acres in a city starved for public access to its own shoreline….And to answer that, we have to get comfortable with the real scale of what we’re talking about. Four hundred fifty acres is the size of an entire district. It’s a blank canvas on which other cities have built everything from world-class parks to waterfront neighborhoods to cultural destinations that define their civic identity.”
By “it” in the last sentence, we think she means Burke.
We agree that 450 acres at Burke’s location would not be the best place to develop an airport. However, we’re not looking at a “blank canvas” and deciding what do with “vacant land”.
The airport already exists, helping to fuel the city’s economy. And the toxic sludge and waste below the airport already exists. There’s no virgin land of rolling green hills here. There is profound toxic and hazardous materials below the airport, such that anyone who breaks the surface for any reason must wear hazmat and other personal protection equipment. Depending on the extend of the toxic waste, the cost of remediation may readily fall between $500M-$1B, if not more, given the depth and extent of the buried waste. One engineer with knowledge of the airport’s subsurface put it at “definitely over $1 billion.” If deep-pocket developers were clamoring to get into Cleveland and willing to pay for remediation before a single hotel room or restaurant or shop could be built, then there’d be no issue. We should just hope that they don’t notice that there is better-located vacant land that has sat undeveloped for decades just west of the airport (and soon to be even more land if the stadium is demolished). And we should hope that there aren’t other cities on the planet that can demand higher rents and return on investment for a developer that will make paying $500M-$1B in environmental remediation an attractive undertaking.
So the question, actually, is not, “whether Burke is the best use of 450 lakefront acres in a city starved for public access to its own shoreline” but, "What is the best use of 450 lakefront acres that is currently a functional airport that contributes to the local economy that is built on a toxic waste dump that could cost a billion dollars to remediate before a park or anything else is built?"
In the third article, “’Nobody gets a do-over like this:’ Momentum builds to claim Cleveland’s lakefront from Burke” it states, “Chris Quinn, who agreed with the closure momentum, emphasized that the conversation has evolved: “I think that horse is out of the barn. I think it’s going to close. So, we need to evolve the conversation now into, what do we do with it?”
Again, Burke hatred is fueling nonsense. This Chris Quinn statement says it all: the desire or proclaimed “momentum” is to close Burke without any real reason beyond closing it—just to close it. There is no concept, such as, ‘we must close it because we are going to build x”. So its closure for the sake of closure. And, beyond this, there is no plan, no funding for building anything, no plan for environment remediation, and no estimate or real understanding of the toxic wasteland that sits below the airport surface.
And Mayor Bibb himself has been on an anti-Burke crusade for a while, leading the hate, promising “an honest conversation about the future of Burke” then commissioning two studies that centered on closure that were anything but an “honest conversation.” And notably, neither study recommended closure.
The Bibb Administration denied a commercial carrier to begin operations at Burke to suppress traffic and passenger numbers to help justify his dream of closure. And, tremendously significant, Mayor Bibb is seeking to bypass FAA’s review of Burke’s role in the national airspace system and contributions to safety at Cleveland Hopkins by trying to get Congress to pass a law allowing or ordering the closure of Burke—and with no mention, of course, that any development would require $500M-$1B in environmental remediation—or even conditioning any closure on a full environmental analysis and cost estimate—meaning the land will just sit vacant for decades, closed off to the public, while taxpayers foot the bill for maintenance and policing.
Mayor Bibb sent a letter, co-signed by Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne, to Ohio Senators Moreno and Husted, Representative Shontel Brown, and Transportation Secretary Duffy requesting Federal “partnership and support” and “explicit Congressional authorization” to close Burke. We wrote a response to the same recipients as well to the FAA and some others. Read our letter, which attaches Bibb’s original letter, here.
Ultimately, if the airport is closed, this would be the most likely scenario:
Cleveland loses the $77M annually in positive economic impact from the airport (cited from one of Bibb’s studies).
Cleveland becomes less economically competitive to other cities.
Environmental tests are eventually done and find that remediation will cost $500M-$1B, and no one wants to step forward to foot the bill—whether Cleveland city taxpayers, the Federal government, or private developers.
The airport is fenced off with a chain link fence given the environmental hazards to public health and the need to protect the public from entering.
People eventually use the land as a dumping ground again—mattresses, cars and car parts, trash, bodies. As a new dump, it will support the old adage, ‘history repeats itself’. To pay for attempts to clean the trash and for related police activity, taxpayers will certainly pay more than a few million dollars a year, when today they pay zero and actually receive a benefit from Burke’s presence.
The Plain Dealer and cleveland.com are supposed to be a balanced source of reason. But instead, they’re pushing the anti-Burke hatred and trying to close the airport to the city’s detriment without calling for any balanced studies or even an environmental assessment. It makes no sense.
What’s next? Plain Dealer/cleveland.com editors, joined by Bibb and Ronayne and an angry crowd burning effigies of Williams Hopkins and Mayor Burke? City Manager Williams Hopkins (for whom Hopkins Airport is named) presented the idea of a lakefront airport in 1927 and Mayor Burke (for whom BKL is named) oversaw construction of the airport and presided over its opening in 1947.
But regarding Mayor Bibb, we don’t get it. Is it just poor leadership and cluelessness by not wanting to undertake any environmental cost estimates before trying to shut down an established economic asset? Or is it an intentional effort to shut down Burke knowing the consequences that it could not be used for anything else so knowingly creating “Garbage Dump on the Lakefront 2.0”? And if so, why? Or is it something else? The public deserves to know. His current actions make no sense, particularly as they are moving to make Cleveland—and Clevelanders—worse off.
See our deeper analysis about Burke here.