Video: County Board April 17, 2013 – The Airport Discussion..

EDGAR CO. (ECWd) –

The Edgar County Board meeting on April 17, 2013 lasted over 2 hours. We will report on some of the major items discussed during that meeting in seperate articles.

Our first topic is the Airport discussion portion, As you may have read in this article, the airport advisory board made a recommendation to the county board. This was set-up over a week ago by Chris Patrick, Adonna Bennett, Ben Jenness, and Mike Heltsley. They have done nothing by throw monkey wrenches into the writing of the lease, and intentionally stalling its progress so that today could happen. Chris was insistant that this item be on the agenda, as he spoke about it during the county board study session a couple days prior.

So as far as we can tell, the “vote” at the airport meeting was setup long before that meeting happened, which makes us wonder where these people have been meeting to discuss public business in private. Anyway, Ben Jenness, reading what Chris told him to read, made a motion based on the “recommendation” of the advisory board to not allow any business to operate out of the main hangar of the airport and to stop working on the lease. This motion failed, as it should have.

The “reason” for not leasing space appears to be because they need more room for “airport stuff”, like storage and other things. It was never an issue when Jimmy had his private airplane in there for several year without paying any rent, but now all of a sudden, they need the space.

Jeff Voigt then motioned to send the original motion, that being to formulate a business lease, back to the airport advisory board and tell them to finish what they were tasked to do. He further motioned that RSB stay in the hangar on a month to month capacity until this gets ironed out. That motion passed, even though in a little confused moment Chris though he could vote NO and kill the motion.

When watching this video, you can observe and hear Chris trying to confuse the second motion in an effort to bring more discussion on it.

So as it stands at this point in time, the airport advisory committee is too continue working on the lease, RSB Aviation will remain in place, Jimmy Wells will accept rent from RSB, and there are two new committee members after Heltslsey and Jenness resigned (from the airport committee). Chris wasn’t a happy camper after that vote and was showing it in the courthouse hallway during a break prior to closed session to discuss litigation related items.

Video is below: