Sunday, April 23, 2000
By BRENT LARKIN
THE PLAIN DEALER
Cleveland has done lots wrong to grease its slide into the second tier of the nation’s large urban markets. But something it did not do in the 1970s wreaks havoc with its future to this day. It didn’t build the jetport in Lake Erie.
Sure, the jetport would have been expensive - a couple billion dollars in 1970s money. But that steep price tag seems a bargain when compared with spending $1.3 billion today to slap a Band-Aid on Cleveland Hopkins International Airport that might make Hopkins adequate. When you throw in another runway planned for about 15 years from now, new terminals and another parking garage, the price of keeping Hopkins patched together probably will exceed what it would have cost to build the jetport.
This is not to ignore the significant problems posed by building a new airport. Among them were Lake Erie’s fickle weather, the environment, and the numerous construction hurdles involved in building an airport on water. But all airport construction and expansion causes complicated problems, as evidenced by the legal wrangling over Hopkins that has been going on for a decade, with no end in sight.
The idea for building a new airport on a man-made island four to eight miles out into Lake Erie, connected to land by a causeway and rail service, was hatched in the early 1960s. But nothing really happened until the early ’70s, when the federal government and the Growth Association funded a $1.5 million feasibility study. That study proposed diking and then draining a vast area where the lake’s depth is a relatively shallow 60 to 70 feet. Runways and a terminal would have been built on a fill foundation.
Building the jetport would have taken 10 to 12 years. When finished, it would have boasted two parallel runways of at least 12,000 feet a mile apart, and two 9,000-foot alternative runways.
The jetport would have had unlimited room for expansion. Flight paths would have been totally unobstructed. Residential noise problems would have been minimal. Simultaneous takeoffs and landings could have been conducted year-round. It would have been located at downtown Cleveland’s doorstep. And it would have been a facility far superior to those Cleveland now envies in nearby cities like Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Detroit.
In every way, the jetport would have been the anti-Hopkins. And it would have lifted for centuries the threat of inadequate air service being a major impediment to Great Cleveland’s long-term economic viability.
The jetport was the idea of legendary NASA engineer Abe Silverstein, who was the first director of NASA’s space operations and later coordinated the Mercury program, which sent the first U.S. astronauts into space. And, when talk of building the new airport turned serious in the 1970s, its chief advocate was Squire Sanders & Dempsey lawyer James Davis, at the time perhaps the city’s most powerful business leader.
But while Silverstein and Davis shared a vision for a greater Greater Cleveland, the area’s political leaders at the time were anything but visionary.
The only prominent elected official who spoke passionately about the need for a jetport was County Commissioner Seth Taft, who repeatedly predicted the jetport would "produce a tremendous economic boost to downtown Cleveland." A quarter-century later, Taft still feels the failure to proceed represents a huge missed opportunity.
"Would we be better off today?" asked Taft. "Certainly - especially with the problems we see at Hopkins right now. The jetport would have been a huge asset."
But Taft’s opinion was the minority view back then. Most, maybe all, of Greater Cleveland’s other elected officials lacked the political will to fight for it, or the understanding of the impact air service has on a region’s economy.
Outright opposition to the jetport was plentiful. It centered largely on financial and ecological concerns about building it in a lake that at the time suffered from a serious pollution problem. Leading that opposition was a young member of City Council, Dennis Kucinich, who conducted council hearings where opponents voiced concerns. Then, in 1977, Kucinich was elected mayor and the jetport’s fate was sealed.
It’s official date of death was May 8, 1978, when the Federal Aviation Administration formally cut off funding for the project. For a time, there was talk of building a new airport near Ravenna or in Lorain County, but by then even the business community’s enthusiasm had waned.
Meanwhile, Hopkins’ needs went unattended during the jetport debate of the 1970s and throughout most of the 1980s.
While other cities built or expanded airports, Hopkins stood still. United Airlines’ huge presence disappeared. And Cleveland fell hopelessly behind.
Nearly two decades worth of inertia at Hopkins has made it difficult for the city to catch up, despite the efforts of Mayor Michael R. White. The mayor has always had the right vision for Hopkins. But, as usual, that vision is blurred and White’s effectiveness inhibited by an inability to get along with just about everyone.
Still, White’s piecemeal plan to rebuild Hopkins is the best of a bad lot of alternatives. Building a new airport - either to the south or in the lake - is now cost-prohibitive.
The jetport idea died when Cleveland was a city that refused to think big. Back then, it always thought small.
That’s the way most of its leaders liked it - taking things one day at a time. Looking ahead a month or two seemed like an eternity. Glancing deep into the future was beyond their comprehension.
We’re still paying for that short-sightedness. We probably will be for decades to come.