May 8, 2002 – The Federal Aviation Administration is monitoring the situation at St. Croix's Henry E. Rohlsen Airport but hasn't decided whether to shut the facility down if the territory doesn't meet a Dec. 31 deadline to close the adjacent Anguilla landfill, according to an FAA spokeswoman in Atlanta.
"We never discussed closing the airport," Kathleen Bergen said Wednesday.
She said it was unlikely the FAA would order the airport closed but would not speculate about a decision to be made more than six months down the road.
Her remarks contradict the popular perception that the FAA will close the airport if the V.I. government does not find an alternative to the Anguilla landfill for disposing of St. Croix's solid waste by the end of the year.
The Anguilla site is at the end of the airport runway, and FAA officials have said the landfill's considerable bird population threatens aviation safety. Closing the landfill was a condition imposed when the FAA awarded the territory nearly $9.4 million in grants to expand the runway.
With the Dec. 31 deadline looming, the clamor is growing. Sen. Donald "Ducks" Cole, who chairs the Senate Planning and Environmental Protection Committee, will hold yet another hearing on the matter next Tuesday at the Legislature chambers on St. Croix.
Cole contended on Wednesday that the FAA could decertify the airport, which would force it to close. He said he was researching the matter for Tuesday's meeting. Closing the airport would devastate St. Croix's economy, he said.
The Source reported that at a March 4 meeting, Cole warned that the government is facing "Hurricane Anguilla" as debate continues on finding a feasible alternative site for St. Croix's garbage.
The Port Authority's executive director, Gordon Finch, went public with a full-page advertisement in a print newspaper that included a March 6 letter from Bart Vernace, an FAA official. Vernace wrote that he had met on Jan. 28 with Port Authority staff to discuss efforts associated with closing the landfill. He said that although it seemed possible the territory would miss the Dec. 31 deadline for shutting the landfill down, the FAA would not change its deadline.
"It has taken us a number of years to get to this point," Vernace wrote, "and we will wait until the deadline is reached to see if closure is in fact imminent before we make a determination on revising the special condition for a few weeks or taking compliance action."
While published reports have indicated that Finch now claims he knew the FAA had never threatened to shut the airport down if the landfill deadline passed, his remarks in the newspaper ad seem to imply that there is trouble ahead if Anguilla remains open. In the ad, he stated that he decided to publish the FAA's latest letter to him "because there is still a segment of our community who does not believe that the FAA is serious about closure of the Anguilla landfill by Dec. 31."
Finch did not return several telephone calls requesting comment. The FAA told the government several years ago that it must close the landfill, but the territory has yet to come up with an alternative solid-waste disposal location.
Two sites have been proposed: One is 129 acres of current farmland in Estate Jealousy north of the Agriculture Department headquarters and adjacent to the Castle Burke, Upper Love and Calquohoun communities and the Educational Complex. The other is the old Hurricane Hugo debris site in Estate Body Slob across from the Friedensberg housing community and next to the new fish and produce markets and northeast of Central High School.
Government efforts to find an interim solution are in the bidding stage.
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