Dear Editor:

 Re: Braden pokes holes in airport plan, Review, Feb. 2

Thanks to the Review for having the courage to question the city’s aerotropolis scheme.

Former councillor Dave Braden is right to oppose the “plane stupid” city plan to industrialize about 3,000 acres of farmland around the airport – a scheme also known as the aerotropolis. It’s another example of desperation planning that Hamilton is so famous for. Besides all the practical objections Braden has detailed, this scheme is also completely unaffordable and ignores growing threats to local food security.

The city is already $2 billion behind in the maintenance and replacement of existing roads, pipes and other infrastructure, and that deficit is growing by nearly $200 million per year. Taxpayers can’t afford to fix what we have, much less spend half a billion dollars servicing a field of dreams around an airport, which has never come near its predicted potential and now faces rising fuel prices and shrinking passenger numbers.

The official $353-million servicing cost for the aerotropolis doesn’t include $125 million for a new trunk sewer, or an unknown amount for a new trunk water pipe, or any share of the $800 million required to expand the city’s sewage treatment plant to accommodate forecast growth.

More importantly, destroying more farmland is foolish in the face of the massive price jumps we’ve seen in the global food market as a result of the extreme weather associated with climate change.

Hamilton lost 22 per cent of its farmland between 1971 and 2006 – a disappearance rate four times higher than the rest of southern Ontario.

The aerotropolis is a gamble that climate change will stop and threats to our food security will evaporate; a gamble that the airport will finally grow; a gamble that companies willing to industrialize this area will arrive; a gamble that the landowners will welcome them instead of the residential development they are now fighting for; and a massive gamble with taxpayers’ money. It’s also an official declaration that we’re leaving the cleanup of the bayfront industrial area to our grandchildren.

We need city politicians who will fix what we have and stop being sucked in by wild schemes.

Don McLean
Stoney Creek