BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Telegraph Staff Writer
KEYSTONE HEIGHTS— The city council imposed a September 1 deadline for deciding whether to change how the city’s airport is governed.
During the council’s May 1 meeting, Mayor Nina Rodenroth proposed the deadline saying she did not want the decision to drag on.
During the previous month’s council meeting, members Chris Thompson and Tony Brown said they wanted to explore changing the facility’s governance from its current form of an independent authority to one directly governed by the city council, with the council taking the advice of an advisory committee.
During an April 24 workshop, the airport’s board, advisors and tenants argued for keeping the current model in place, stating that governing the airport requires specialized knowledge and warning that changing the facility’s governing body could endanger some state funding.
Tenants also pointed to the management of Palatka’s Kay Larkin Airport as an example of a council-led airport that does not timely respond to the needs of tenants.
Bradford County wants our airport
During the May 1 Keystone Heights council meeting, Council member Tony Brown said he learned a lot from the workshop and, since the April 24 meeting, has contacted Palatka officials as well as reaching out to leaders at the Northeast Regional Airport at St. Augustine.
Brown added that he still wants to explore changing the airport’s governance but admitted that now, he is torn.
“My gut’s telling me one thing, and my head’s telling me something different, so I don’t know which one to believe,” he said.
“I just feel that we need to look into doing something different,” Brown added, “if it means being able to hire the airport manager that reports to this council and to having an advisory board instead of an authority board, those are questions that I have.”
Brown said that the council went through a similar evaluation when it converted to a council-manager form of government years ago.
“It wasn’t easy, but it got done, and I feel like it’s ran pretty darn good the way it is,” he said of the conversion to the council-manager form of government.
Brown also said he has heard that Bradford County wants to take over the airport.
“I mentioned this a couple of months ago to an authority board member that I’d heard that Bradford County wants our airport,” he said.
“What I’ve heard bothers me,” he added. “That airport is owned by the City of Keystone Heights, not Clay County, not Bradford County. It’s owned by the City of Keystone Heights, and if any county, whether it be Bradford or Clay, wants to maneuver their way in to take over, it’s going to have to come from this dais right here, and as long as I’m here, the City of Keystone is going to own that airport.”
Leave it alone
During the public comment section of the meeting, former council member Paul Yates argued for keeping the airport’s current structure. He said that in 2009, when he and Tony Brown were on the council, the panel concluded that keeping the municipality and airport separate protected Keystone Heights taxpayers from liability in the event of a significant loss at the airport.
Council member Steve Hart agreed with Yates, adding that now, the city is only responsible for gross negligence at the airport. However, the city would take on contract and tort liability under Brown’s proposal.
“What we would be basically doing, as Mr. Yates suggested, is putting on the backs of the taxpayers of the City of Keystone Heights all of this liability,” Hart said, “and I don’t see any advantage. There’s no trade-off. We would be taking on liability, and we already have the power to control the board out there. I don’t see that it’s a wise change.”
After calling the proposal to convert the airport into a city department a “bad idea,” Hart said he was willing to listen about alternative forms of airport governance. He also restated his earlier assertions that the council could exert more control over the facility while at the same time not incurring additional liability by making rules that would be binding on the airport board.
Council member Bobby Brown said the municipality’s airport is well-known and has a reputation for being well-managed.
“I think we’ve got a couple of gems in Keystone,” he said. “I think one of them is our beach…and the other is our airport.”
“I go places every now and then and tell people I’m from Keystone, and they actually know about the airport,” he continued. “They know about Keystone, and that’s just because we’re so dad gum good at what we’re doing. I think we need to leave it alone. Leave the airport— just leave it alone like it is.”
Mayor Rodenroth, in addition to recommending the timeline for a decision, said she looked forward to getting more information about how the airport now operates and how that would change under a new form of governance.
