Authority changes airport’s name again
The Fayette County Airport Authority on Tuesday changed the name of the county’s airport for the second time this year combining the original name with a controversial name the board selected in January. After about an hour of hearing county residents question the legality and morality of changing the name from the Connellsville Airport to the Joseph A. Hardy Regional Airport, the board unanimously approved renaming it the Joseph A. Hardy Connellsville Airport.
Connellsville City Councilman David McIntire, who said he heard before the meeting about the board’s plans to include Connellsville’s name in the new name, did not support the change.
No one in Tuesday’s audience voiced support for changing the Connellsville Airport name, McIntyre said after the meeting.
“I don’t think this is the end of it,” McIntire said.
He said it still might be possible to restore the original name because the board didn’t change it properly.
“It was done wrong,” McIntire said.
The board first changed the name at a special meeting held at 8 a.m. Jan. 6, a Saturday, without providing advanced public notice of its intentions.
Board members said the name change was a surprise present for Hardy, a county commissioner, for his 84th birthday.
The move surprised residents of Connellsville and other parts of the county, and prompted Connellsville Mayor Judy Reed to search for and find a 1936 contract between the county and the city that says the Connellsville Airport name cannot be changed even if it is sold.
Connellsville paid 75 percent of the $15,000 cost to buy the airport property in 1936 and the county paid the remaining 25 percent. No other municipalities in the county contributed to the cost.
Connellsville owned and operated the airport until 1966, when it sold the facility to the county.
Reed also found city contracts for various repairs and improvements at the airport.
Although Reed didn’t attend Tuesday’s meeting, a number of residents spoke out against changing the original name.
Evelyn Hovanec of Uniontown said the board should have publicly explained what it wanted to do before voting on it and the controversy that followed the name change makes Hardy look bad.
Authority solicitor Mark Rowan said the airport authority board is a subdivision of the state, not the county, and has the power to change the airport’s name.
He said the 1936 contract was never recorded and was not “preserved” in the 1966 deed that transfers ownership from Connellsville to the county.
“When they did the deed, there’s no reference to that ’36 agreement,” Rowan said, adding that deed does not contain restrictions on changing the airport’s name either.
“You cannot have unrecorded documents controlling that,” Rowan said.
When the 1966 deed was recorded, it became the final word on the airport property and “extinguished” the 1936 agreement, Rowan said.
He said he consulted with other attorneys and they agreed with his opinion.
Another resident asked the board if anyone other than the board members supported the name change?
“One hundred percent of the people I talked to support it,” Chairman Jesse T. Wallace III said, adding that he talked to 100 to 200 people about the airport name.
Former board member Martin Griglak of Connellsville said airport name changes had been proposed in the past, but the county commissioners never allowed it because of an agreement that prohibited changing the name.
Griglak said the way the board changed the name was akin to the late-night pay raise the state legislature approved in July 2005.
Board member Mark Wasler accepted blame for conducting the special meeting on a Saturday morning.
He said the meeting was supposed to be held at 5 p.m. Friday, Jan. 5, but he was not available at that time. The meeting was then scheduled for the next morning, he said.
Griglak said taxpayers are ultimately paying for airport’s planned runway extension, but lengthening the runway will only benefit those wealthy enough to own airplanes.
Wasler said many business people travel in corporate planes. He said businesses in the county are expanding and the runway extension will help accommodate that growth.
Rebecca Reed of Uniontown asked what Hardy has done to deserve having the airport named after him.
Wallace said Hardy revitalized downtown Uniontown, provided funds to Habitat for Humanity and loaned the authority an $800,000 line of credit and has not collected interest.
Wasler said Hardy also gave some money to the East End United Community Center in Uniontown.
He said there are other millionaires in the county that haven’t done anything to benefit the county.
“I’ve lost a lot of respect for Hardy,” Reed said.
Marigrace Butela of Dunbar Township asked the board members to explain their relationships with Hardy.
Wasler and board member Terry Shallenberger said they are friends with Hardy, Wallace said he was an acquaintance and board member Todd Radolec said his firm did some work on property that Hardy now owns, but he was not the owner when the work was done.
Karen Hechler, president of the Connellsville Historical Society, said the airport would not have been completed without Connellsville.
McIntire said he said he has heard from more than 200 people including people from outside of Connellsville that oppose changing the airport’s name.
He said thousands of people made the airport what it is today and it is not fair to name it after one person.
“It’s going to be hard to look at Mr. Hardy with the same respect,” McIntire said.
He said he didn’t understand how the board could simply change the airport’s historic name.
“We feel we’ve been robbed,” McIntire said.
Board member Myrna Giannopoulos made the motion for the latest name change.
After the meeting, she said it was one of the compromise names she suggested at the Jan. 6 meeting. Giannopoulos said she also suggested naming only the airfield after Hardy, but neither suggestion was considered. She abstained from the vote at the Jan. 6 meeting.