Originally Posted by
Traffic_Is_Er_Was
You mean the same visitors who whinge about spending $$ on a landing or usage fee?
We don't whinge about it. We just don't visit. That's the point.
If a council wants to charge my friends and I $10 to land/park when what we intended to do was spend around $2,000 in the local area over a weekend, the local businesses miss out. We go elsewhere.
Originally Posted by
Traffic_Is_Er_Was
And yet Temora charge a family $13 a time (or $605-$726 a year) to use the town swimming pool.
And if you check the council website for Temora (and e.g. Cowra), they specify a landing/usage fee for their respective aerodromes. Both councils came to understand that charging the fee was 'silly' (see reason above).
Originally Posted by
Traffic_Is_Er_Was
Because for many councils they are none of those things. They are just high cost assets (liabilities) used directly or indirectly by very few of the ratepayers. Of any of those points, they may maintain the aerodrome for the aeromedical potential, but that is going to be a very infrequent use, and not something that they aren't going to try and offset some of the costs of 365 days a year maintenance to provide.
Then "many councils" aren't very strategic thinkers are they? That's a problem. That "very infrequent use" could be the difference between life and death for someone, or a town being immolated or not. The local pool's not much help when someone needs to be medivac'd to a city hospital. I suppose it's a good source of water to fight bushfires, but the most effective aerial fire fighting aircraft need fuel and a good runway when they're chockas. I'm always happy when they're sitting on standby, less than a 100 metres from my property, on 'catastrophic fire danger' day.
One way in which we 'encourage' our local council to be a little more 'strategic' is to provide data, based on aviation visitor spend in the local area, as to what would be lost if the Avdata snakeoil were to be purchased by council. The twice a work-day courier service company told council they would simply stop coming if fees were introduced. And we also inform the local businesses what would happen. Effective so far.