Friday, November 6, 2009

Group hired to attract Denver air service

Relocation arguments resurface

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By PAT MURPHY
Express Staff Writer

The Friedman Memorial Airport Authority on Tuesday agreed to fund aviation consultant Mead and Hunt to help develop a possible Denver-Friedman air route.

The firm will develop economic data to present to Frontier Airlines in hopes of convincing the carrier to inaugurate a route to Friedman, which would open an array of new markets in the Midwest and East.

A request for $7,800 to fund the study was made by Carol Waller, executive director of the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau and a member of the Fly Sun Valley Alliance.

The request gave two board members with long memories an opportunity for soft-edged revenge. At least two chamber board members have criticized a proposal to relocate the airport to a proposed site south of U.S. Highway 20, in southern Blaine County.

After Waller said Mead and Hunt had been working with resort groups for the past two years, airport authority members Susan McBryant and Len Harlig reminded her that several years ago, several leading businessmen questioned Mead and Hunt's professional competence during public hearings on economic justifications for relocating Friedman.

"A lot of the same players" in those criticisms, McBryant told Waller, "were pretty horrible about the competency of [Mead and Hunt]."

Then Harlig joined in. He asked whether the new agreement with Sun Valley Stages to provide three roundtrip bus trips daily in the winter to Boise and two roundtrips in the summer to pick up visitors was a "defensive reaction to the fact Friedman is expensive to travel to, has a lot of (weather) reliability problems, [is] only serviced by two airlines, has very high fares—all the reasons for why we should move to a relocated airport where those aren't problems."

Waller smiled, but did not concede Harlig's point.