(This article appeared in the August 3, 1998 issue of the Charleston Gazette)

Believe it or not, the West Virginia Port Authority is still pursuing the lame idea of a transpark - even after the airlines, an expert hired by the Port Authority, and various other knowledgeable folks have repeatedly declared the project unnecessary, infeasible or risky.

These true believers are not interested in reason, but in foisting their fantasies for our future onto the taxpayers. At their last meeting, authority members voted to hand over another $90,000 to the engineering firm they had hired as consultants.

The project has had many names - Midway Airport, Transhub, Wayport, Transpark, regional airport. It seems that every time some aspect of the proposed project is shown to be bankrupt, they change the name to give it respectability. We can’t call it "Transpark" anymore now because that term is copyrighted. It seems the owners of the term don’t want to be associated with this group.

The Port Authority has been trying to pull some wool over our eyes. Last year, they tried to hold site-selection meetings behind closed doors. Now that a court forced them to include the public in their deliberations, we are hearing about how important it is that we make a decision quickly.

Even though most agree that our airports are underutilized, the authority tells us that we have to build this billion-dollar project now or the window of opportunity will be lost forever.

We should be very cautious that this window of opportunity is not really a trapdoor, into which we pour hundreds of millions of dollars for a project that will stand idle for years.

Perhaps they think that land won’t be available in 50 years. Of course, if all land in the region were being used, it would show that we didn’t need a "Transhub" to spur growth. But somehow I have a feeling that those 400-plus square miles of flat mountaintops (enough for 50 regional airports) created by mountaintop removal within 35 miles of Charleston will still be available.

Maybe the governor will buy us a few square miles of flat mountains at the Hobet mine just off Corridor G and save it for the day when we need a larger airport. This way, we might find one use for this wasting of our heritage.

I think it’s time we pulled the Port Authority off this goose chase and instead focus on developing other areas of our infrastructure that are needed now.