And what ticks me off is the FAA will let them - after pumping several million dollars into developing the airport. Including a land grant that carries the condition that the airport remain as an airport open to the public in perpetuity. Now, the FAA did enforce that clause in Oceanside, CA, but its contract enforcement is spotty at best. Basically, whichever airport engineering/consulting firm "has a buddy at the ADO" gets the dough and they want to keep them at the taxpayers trough. So, they overlook pesky little things like keeping airports open - even though that's supposed to be their damned job.

The thing that makes it "illegal" is the contract an airport authority signs when it accepts funds under the FAA's Airport Improvement Program (funding 20% by the general fund by most estimates). This really got sticky when they added this to their contracts. Some states started screaming about the Fed telling the States what they could and could not do with their own land. The contract was carefully worded so that the airport sponsor was only required to do the best it could to prevent such projects from going forward. That's what ticked me off about Kendallville's situation. Kendallville not only did not do everything possible to prevent the school from going up, it actually took action to insure the school would be built. It actually made an exception to its own law to make sure the school could be built there. So, Kendallville is in the position (and the fsckers at the FAA are complicit) of claiming that "taking action to make sure something happens is the same thing as taking action to prevent something from happening."