In advance of the August 1 Oregon State Aviation Board meeting, a new document appeared as part of the read-ahead material for Aviation Board members. That document, the new Dept. of Aviation Master Plan Process flowchart, aims to define agency master planning so it conforms to the agency’s newly adopted State Agency Coordination Program.
The flowchart is not attributed and does not contain an effective date, but nonetheless appears to summarize how the ODA will do airport master planning in the future. What is immediately striking is how many significant deviations from this defined process occurred during the Aurora Airport Master Plan process from 2010 to 2012.
Claiming that this new process is part of ODA’s new State Agency Coordinating (SAC) Program and did not apply at the time of Aurora Airport master planning is not acceptable in that ODA was at the time under the Dept. of Transportation SAC program, which is essentially identical to the new program adopted by the ODA, and which should have been followed at the time.
Therefore, Friends of French Prairie has submitted a letter to Director Betty Stansbury at ODA citing these deviations, and demanding that ODA “start that process over, with a properly constituted Planning Advisory Committee and a good faith commitment to public participation in the process.”
To confirm, the Aurora Airport Master Plan posted at the ODA web site did not follow the master plan process required at the time, was not approved, was never legally adopted. It is nothing more than a draft plan that needs to be scrapped and replaced with the output of a properly conducted master plan process.