A regional board could boost airline service in central Missouri

After 40 years, it’s time for the City of Columbia to relinquish control of its problematic airport and let a new regional operating authority controlled by the area’s cities and counties take over. Let’s bring the University of Missouri and maybe the state on board.

The regional airport is simply too important to leave under the thumb of its current owner, so let’s move on and try something new: The Central Missouri Regional Airport Operating Authority or CMRAOA. This could end all the petty rivalries and get the whole area behind regional airport.

I’ll bet if you asked some of us, we’d have second thoughts about living here or wonder why we continue to hang around. Columbia has always been a tough place to get to. Jokes still abound going back to the era of stagecoaches and riverboats, but all laughing aside, traveling to and fro the last 100 or so miles has never been a highlight of one’s trip. By bus, train, taxi, shuttle, the thumb or your own vehicle, it’s always been about the last stage that leaves visitors perplexed as to why a place so touted for its other strengths continues to have such mediocre airline service.

While air travel for most of us is probably a moot point, it will always be in the forefront as a vital business and development issue. Air service is a gateway issue indicating how welcoming—or unwelcoming—Columbia and the region appear to others.

For the past few years, the region has been condemned to coupling with the two non-hub airports in St. Louis and Kansas City with flight options that often aren’t very good. Surface transit for the first two or three hours, both coming and going, remains a fatiguing experience. Whether you drive or someone else does, trudging along Interstate 70 has never been my idea of happily starting or ending a trip.

A stellar facility when it first opened in March 1956, the St. Louis International Airport—Lambert Field for many of us—has been turned upside-down so many times that it has become a nightmare to use, even though it’s only 110 miles away. Had Illinois prevailed with its audacious plan to replace Lambert back in the ‘80s with a brand-new facility near Waterloo 30 miles further away, maybe Kansas City’s arguably superior international airport would have held the trump card as the airport-of-choice for mid-Missouri travelers.

What travelers want today is direct jet service to a hub airport, such as Chicago-O’Hare or Dallas-Fort Worth. As a second option, we’d settle for daily service to lesser facilities in those two areas: Chicago-Midway or Dallas-Love Field. Moving on to the Central Missouri Regional Airport Operating Authority and true regional expansion and operation of the airport could provide the heft to get service to one or more key hub airline cities.

CMRAOA would be chartered by a half-dozen or more mid-Missouri counties, including Boone, Cole and Callaway, and principal cities such as Columbia and Jefferson City, Fulton, Moberly, Mexico and Boonville as well as the Lake of the Ozarks area. The University of Missouri—and maybe the state itself—would be on board as well. Directors would be appointed to operate CMRAOA, which in turn would hire the best professional airport manager. Each owning entity would contribute funds based on population, while CMRAOA would have the authority to set fees and issue bonds.

The key to regaining satisfactory airline service to one or more hub airports is to require use of the regional airport by employees of the University of Missouri and the State of Missouri as well as major regional employers. Let’s put the university’s feet to the fire and ask how they expect Discovery Ridge to succeed without decent airline service. Look no further than Champaign-Urbana, where the University of Illinois owns and operates Willard Airport as well as Purdue University-West Lafayette, Indiana and the Southern Illinois University-Carbondale for guidance and advice.

People keep telling me airlines would provide service to a hub city if a major flight user such as the University of Missouri could guarantee a certain number of employee bookings per month. Who wants to take them on and call their bluff? Moving ownership and operation of the airport to a new regional authority, it seems to me, would represent a fresh start to the central Missouri airline service conundrum, especially if we can get MU on board as a principal airport participant just as comparable universities have done in their communities.