MidAmerica Airport: No Landings Now, But Just You Wait
St. Louis, MO (December 9, 2001) -- In the corner of a departure lounge at MidAmerica Airport, the television was tuned to CNN, where Attorney General John Ashcroft was testifying about civil liberties. He was watched by rows and rows of empty chairs. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered a spectacular view of the 10,000- foot runway. There wasn't a plane in sight.
For that matter, there wasn't a passenger in sight or a gate agent or a baggage handler. The newspaper racks were empty, the rental car counter unstaffed, the baggage carts lined up neatly. The entire terminal was deserted. "It is kind of strange, isn't it?" laughed Mike Conner, the deputy airport director. "We actually have people coming out on the weekends just to look at it."
Why not? As Metro East tourist attractions go, MidAmerica has it all over apple orchards and Indian mounds. It sits like a giant Fisher-Price toy in the middle of cornfields brown with stubble, a shiny, fully-equipped $213 million airport with zero scheduled commercial flights.
The last one took off Monday, when Pan American Airways ended its desultory 14 month relationship with MidAmerica. "They only had seven planes in their entire fleet," said Rick Hargrove, the retired Air Force brigadier general who is MidAmerica's director. "Every time one of them was out of service, we'd get delays and cancellations here. They never did much advertising and they didn't go anywhere many folks wanted to go."
On the other hand, Pan Am was the only airline MidAmerica ever had, the only hard evidence that this $213 million bet might someday pay off. So you'd think folks would be devastated.
You'd be wrong. When you go to work for MidAmerica Airport, they issue you special glasses that see 20 years into the future. "I'm a 'glass-is-half-full' kind of guy," Hargrove said.
And he's positively gloomy when you compare him with his boss, St. Clair County Board Chairman John Baricevic, who is to MidAmerica what Barnum was to the circus. Baricevic is like the kid who's thrilled to find horse poop in his Christmas stocking because he figures a pony is right outside.
Three days after Pan Am flew off into the sunset, Baricevic stood in front of a large aerial photo of MidAmerica posted on the wall of the airport office, a converted farm house on the edge of the property. It shows the terminal and the runway, the adjacent Scott Air Base and its parallel 8,000-foot runway, the new tower that serves them both and the surrounding cornfields, most of which St. Clair County owns or controls.
"And here," Baricevic said, "is where we're going in the future." He points to where someone has inked in two more runways and taxiways, parallel 10,000-foot monsters with 4,500 feet of separation, all-weather capable and served by a huge new terminal that exists, for the moment, only in John Baricevic's imagination. "When I say 'future,' it may mean 75 years," he said. "But we've got the room and we're planning for it."
In the nearly 25 years I've spent talking with politicians in St. Louis, Baricevic is the only one I've ever met who thinks 75 years ahead.
And as he knows, it won't take that long. Lambert Airport, even with the new runway that will be nearly 20 years in the making by the time it's open in five years, will be at capacity in 2020. Lambert is out of room. Time, and geography, are on Baricevic's side.
"This is a St. Louis thing," Baricevic said, "maybe the ultimate St. Louis thing. It's the age-old St. Louis problem -- everyone is protecting his own turf. Somehow the leadership in St. Louis sees a job going to Illinois as a loss. We can't develop the region economically if everyone is going to be concerned that Missouri will lose a job. It doesn't do us a lot of good to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic."
Baricevic has an interstate highway running next to his airport. He has a MetroLink line heading for it. He has a railroad willing to build spurs to it for industrial users. He's got the Air Force as a partner. He's also an adroit old-school politician who knows how to work the levers to fund MidAmerica's $5 million-a-year budget while he plays his waiting game.
If this were a Monopoly game, he'd be the guy building hotels on his property, just waiting for you to land on it.
And he'd be smiling.
Information provided by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, St. Louis, MO
Kevin Horrigan Article © the St. Louis Post-Dispatch
| 
Email
Return to Home Page