Now that the Mower County Board of Commissioners have approved the moving of County Road 3 to make way for the airport expansion, the project can proceed.

Monday, April 09, 2001

Now that the Mower County Board of Commissioners have approved the moving of County Road 3 to make way for the airport expansion, the project can proceed. But a proviso was attached to the motion made by the board that said the city of Austin alone is responsible for acquiring all properties necessary to facilitate the relocation.

Acquiring is one thing, but each property owner who lives in the path of the airport expansion must be relocated as well. That takes time. According to Kermit Mahan of the Housing and Redevelopment Authority of Austin, 12 of the occupied properties in the path of the proposed airport expansion have been acquired and relocated as of this week. Mahan expects the remaining four will be acquired and relocated sometime this summer.

Property owner Chris Hogan recently relocated to a house of his choice. Hogan, along with his wife Mary, has been fighting against the airport expansion project for nearly three years. First, Hogan resisted moving from the property. Then, he found the process of relocation just as undesirable. Hogan said the city and the HRA did not find him comparable property, as is required by Federal Aviation Administration law.

"The FAA said: ‘Don’t walk away with anything less than what you had,’" Hogan said.

According to Mahan, the HRA is technical support for the city, aiding in acquiring, relocating and clearing homes out of the airport expansion area.

While Hogan was waiting to be relocated, auctions of other properties in the path of the expansion were advertised by Moline Real Estate. People came to Hogan’s house to measure and look at his property ahead of time, though he was not one of the properties listed to be auctioned. He complained to the city and the HRA supplied him with a "no trespassing" sign.

Hogan said his relocation spent a number of months in a holding pattern because of a lack of response from W.D. Shock.

"(W. D. Shock) is the physical entity that authenticates the payout," Mahan said. The HRA and W.D. Shock have been working in tandem to relocate the residents in the path of the proposed runway.

After Hogan made repeated calls to Bob Swenson of W.D. Shock Co. on Feb. 15, Swenson told Hogan he would not be dealing with him anymore and would refer the issue to Austin City Attorney David Hoversten. Hogan waited and did not hear anything from Hoversten. On March 13, a registered letter from Hogan reached the office of City Engineer Jon Erichson. In it, Hogan asked Erichson what he should do because Swenson would not respond to him. Hogan received a call from W.D. Shock during the last week of March, a few days before he was scheduled to be out of his property – on April 1.

Hogan said he grew tired of waiting for the city to relocate him and decided to relocate himself. The house he is leaving is a rambler on a blacktop road and 9.25 acres, including a burr oak grove. The property contains four storage sheds and a double attached garage. Hogan said W.D. Shock Co., the city’s relocation agent, offered him a 1.5-story house on a gravel road with an unattached two-stall garage on three acres. The house Hogan built is more comparable to what he left behind.

The home was actually Mary’s before it was Chris’. She purchased the white rambler and acreage within the Burrwood Addition from the city, with her late husband, Tom Sollie, in 1985. The city had purchased the property less than a year before the selling date from another couple, in order to expand the runway of the airport to 5,000 feet. After expanding the runway to its current 4,796 feet in 1984, from a length of 3,800 feet, the city decided it did not need the property and sold it to the Sollies.

The Hogan house now stands empty.

"It has been too long and unfair," Mary Hogan said of the process before moving.

"It’s interesting," Mahan said. "There have been 11 clients involved in the acquisition and only one has had all of these problems." Mahan declined to answer any of Hogan’s grievances specifically, but said W.D. Shock and the HRA are continuing to work with him.

In 1995, the engineering firm of Howard, Needles, Tammen and Bergandoff conducted a feasibility study of the Austin airport. The study concluded the critical aircraft in the year 2014 would require a runway length of 6,500 feet. Nine runway alternatives were narrowed to four or five and then down to one. One of the proposed alternatives was a joint Albert Lea-Austin airport that never went beyond the discussion stage.

The expansion of the airport is both a safety and an accessibility issue, according to the city. The larger the airplane that wants to land in Austin, the longer the runway needed. Corporate aircraft, like those owned and used by Hormel Foods Corp. executives, require longer runways. High-tech instrumentation, used in poor visibility conditions, requires a longer runway as well. Expectations are with an improved runway, more corporate airplanes, from businesses located inside and outside of the city limits, will visit Austin via the local airport.

More land must be acquired around the proposed runway in order to comply with the FAA’s mandated clear zone specifications. A clear zone is the safety area surrounding a runway that must be free of obstructions.

The city hopes to one day expand the runway to 6,500 feet, but right now the focus is on the expansion to 5,800 feet, that is scheduled to be completed in 2003. The project is, however, as Erichson has said many times, fund driven. Acquiring the land necessary for the expansion to 6,500 feet means in the long run the city only will be constructing in the future, instead of acquiring and constructing.

May 1 is the deadline for the city to apply for grant money to start on the next phase of the project, that will include acquisition of unoccupied properties within the clear zone, the relocation of County Road 3 and a power line that runs along County 3 will be buried in the area of the clear zone. If the grant is approved, it will come from the federal government, but will be distributed by the state locally.