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Who Really Needs Pittsfield International Airport?
By David Scribner
A decade ago, in more prosperous times - when KB Toys was expanding, when GE Plastics, American-owned, was the most profitable division of General Electric, when the decaying structures of the shuttered GE Transformer complex were to be converted to the manufacture of hybrid buses - the business elite of Pittsfield began calling for an expansion of Pittsfield Municipal Airport.
At public meetings and in the press, Michael Glazer, then KB president and the public face of the corporate campaign to have the airport expanded, threatened to move KB, a Berkshire-grown nationwide toy retailer, out of town unless he could depart the Berkshires on his private jet, and invite fellow toy suppliers to fly in on theirs. The rest of the Chamber of Commerce Talking Heads nodded agreement, implying they, too, would leave Pittsfield unless they could fly in and out.
Since then, the airport expansion, designed to meet Federal Aviation Authority standards for heavier, longer-range jets, has ripened on the drawing boards and grown from a $20 million project to a $40 million one. It has consistently been opposed by a determined coalition of adjacent home owners and environmentalists who argue the dismantling of the Wild Acres Wildlife area is too high a public price to pay for a facility beneficial only to a few. (And for the record, I happen to live in southeast Pittsfield directly underneath the airport's primary approach path - and the sound of screaming jet engines a few hundred feet above my bedroom early in the morning is more reminiscent of a motel near LaGuardia than the Berkshires - though I have never been part on any group opposed to airport expansion.)
Still, ever since GE pulled up stakes and left the city to care for its toxic waste, there is about Pittsfield an attitude of pliant desperation that causes its civic and business leadership to fall for the next big economic fix to replace the departure of its industrial core. Pittsfield is the quintessential sucker for snake-oil panaceas. It's the abused child syndrome.
The latest cure-all is the "creative economy," the conviction that restaurants, theaters and art galleries will revive the city's economy - if they survive. Think Spice. Imagine the Colonial Theatre as a ward of city taxpayers. And what economic benefit has the so-called creative economy actually brought to the average wage earner and family in the central Berkshires? It allows the movers and shakers to admire each other at galas and preen in the lobbies of the Colonial or Barrington Stage, but it sure doesn't do much for those who are out of work or those who can't afford the tickets in spite of having two or three part-time jobs.
Now that the national economy is slipping and sliding into a severe recession or worse, second-homes are up for sale, and the tourist trade is declining as fast the Dow Jones, the shills for the corporate elite are once again rallying around a longer airport runway and a spruced up terminal as the answer to the economic malaise. The state Department of Environmental Protection conducted a public hearing last week to hear pros and cons of reconfiguring Wild Acres wetlands. If approved, airport and city officials hope to begin construction next year, at last.
But the question is who really benefits from a $40 million airport improvement project? If the airport is upgraded, will KB Toys call off its bankruptcy filing? Will Sabic, which now owns GE Plastics, recall the employees it let go this month? Will new enterprises beat down the door to get a spot at the Stanley Industrial Park, created from the ruins of General Electric? Will the enlarged airport result in commercial air traffic?
Not likely. But civic and business talking heads will be able to congratulate themselves; U.S. Rep. John Olver (D-Amherst) will use it in his next congressional campaign; a few more corporate jets will be able to bring guests to Canyon Ranch - where the rich and famous are coddled and provided health care denied to the rest of Berkshire residents; a few members of the Berkshire elite will be able to take off for vacations in the Caribbean; and a few corporate executives can fly in to check up on their holdings here.
If real economic benefit is to be the objective, then that $40 million would be more effectively spent on improving the Berkshire educational system, or on investing in local entrepreneurs who wouldn't need a jet to get to corporate headquarters.
And for that matter, for half the price of the airport project a passenger rail connection could be restored between Pittsfield and Grand Central Station. Now that would put Pittsfield and the Berkshires on the map, as committed to becoming a sustainable community and one willing to embrace the future.
To spend $40 million to upgrade Pittsfield Municipal Airport is the equivalent of a corporate handout, and yet another example of Pittsfield wasting its time, energy and resources on attempts to placate corporate interests which have no real stake in the Berkshires.
This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Record.
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©2009 David Scribner
Starving Artists Detective Agency
255 North St.
Pittsfield, Massachusetts 01201
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