Don’t try to walk from Mounds Park to the Anderson Airport.

A galvanized steel fence, 10-feet high and 3-feet deep underground, surrounds the airfield.

It’s not there to keep planes in — it’s there to keep woodland creatures out.

Until the fence was finished this year, deer and coyotes would sometimes wander in from Mounds Park and get hit by planes.

“Where there’s a problem is during takeoff,” airport manager Steve Darlington said. “When you’re near take-off speed, it’s go or no go at that point, and you could slide off the end of the runway.”

The $1 million fence is just one of the projects the airport wouldn’t be able to afford without aid from the Federal Aviation Administration.

Another is a $2 million runway-widening project, set to start this fall.

With a yearly operating budget of $646,000, the prospect of losing the $1 million to $3 million a year for special projects from the FAA is frightening for airport operators.

But that’s what landfill remonstrators say could happen if JM Corp. goes through with the proposed Mallard Lake landfill.

Not so, says Mark Reed of JM Corp. His landfill, he argued, is perfectly legal.

So who’s right? Opinions differ and the FAA has been less than crystal clear, but it appears a wholesale cutoff is unlikely.

Further confusing the issue is a 1995 letter from the FAA to the airport. It states disapproval for the project, but the consequences of that disapproval are not spelled out. JM officials even dispute the circumstances under which it was obtained.

For its part, the board is taking a stand against the airport, but board members know it will cost them.

“We’re going to have to do what it takes,” Tony Rogers, vice president of the Board of Aviation Commissioners, said. “Unfortunately, any step will cost the airport a lot of money.”

The no-fly zone — for birds, that is

Why does the FAA care about landfills, anyway?

The big problem is wildlife, said FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro of the Great Lakes Region in Chicago. Landfills tend to attract birds, such as seagulls. Birds and planes do not mix.

“When you hit a bird in an airplane, it’s just like a gun going off,” Darlington said. Being hit or sucked into an engine is fatal for a bird, and it could be fatal for the pilot.

“If a gull hits in the windshield, it can kill the pilot or damage the inside,” Darlington said. “It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.”

A bird sucked into an engine can make it shut down, he noted, not good when one is 10,000 feet up.

In Anderson, luckily, the proposed landfill site is close enough that even a single-engine craft would likely be able to make a safe landing, but expensive damage to the craft is also likely, Darlington said.

So far, there’s been only one bird-plane encounter in the history of the Anderson airport when a jet hit a hawk about two years ago. Neither plane nor pilot was hurt, but the bird was killed, Darlington said.

He adds that larger planes with turbine engines can suck in a bird without a problem. Smaller planes, however, are more vulnerable. Unfortunately, that’s the kind of traffic coming into Anderson, Darlington said.

Most planes are small, single-engine private crafts or corporate jets.

Both kinds of traffic are good for the city, Darlington said. When General Motors had a presence in Anderson, the company had its own scheduled flights, but they dwindled when GM started pulling out of Anderson in the 1970s.

Despite that loss, the airport is still a business hub.

“An airport can really be the front door for economic development,” Darlington said. “Wal-Mart, Guide (Corp.), Remy (International) all fly their executives in here.”

Against regulations — sort of

FAA regulations state that new landfills are not permitted within six miles of an airport and the proposed Mallard Lake site is three miles from the Anderson airport. But it doesn’t seem to be a blanket regulation.

“(We) always (decide) on a case-by-case basis,” Molinaro said.

While the FAA has rules regarding landfills, it also has a host of exemptions that make it possible for landfills and airports to co-exist, the spokesman said. They also don’t have any power to actually prohibit one from going in — that’s up to the local authorities.

But the FAA wants airports to keep the agency notified about nearby landfills.

“If they learn about any kind of landfill close to the airport, they need to make a good-faith effort to talk to any authorities,” Molinaro said. “That’s part of the grant process, the assurance that they’ve made a good-faith effort to let us know.”

Mark Reed, president of JM Corp., said that birds are only a problem at poorly maintained landfills and won’t be an issue at Mallard Lake.

“The regulations say ‘Don’t attract birds that interfere with the airport,’” Reed said. “And if you do have a bird problem, you have to fix it.”

If the landfill does go in and birds become a problem, and the airport is caught unaware, then it could be held in noncompliance, Molinaro said.

“We could have to do some restrictions on how planes fly,” he said. “We may put restrictions on where they can fly and when, and then (the airport would) have to live with that.”

But he couldn’t comment on Anderson’s specific case, and the attorney for the Anderson Board of Aviation Commissioners thinks it could hit the airport in the wallet.

“I think what we would find is, there are a lot of grants we might not get,” board attorney J.R. Builta said. “I do expect (the landfill) would cause the airport problems with its funding.”

That letter

In 1995, the FAA sent a letter to the Anderson Board of Aviation Commissioners. It said that, based on a study of the Anderson Airport and the Mallard Lake landfill, “the FAA cannot concur with the construction and operation of the subject facility because of the potential for bird hazards.”

It reminded the board to “take appropriate action, including the adoption of zoning laws, to the extent reasonable, to restrict the use of the land.”

That letter, commissioner Rogers said, makes it plain that if the Mallard Lake landfill goes in, the airport’s funding is in jeopardy.

“They don’t approve of the location of the landfill in relation to the airport,” he said.

But Mark Reed, president of JM Corp., calls the letter itself into question. He said that former Killbuck Concerned Citizens Association President Helen Wean brought the FAA to town on false pretenses to derail the project.

“No one called me,” Reed said.

When he found out about the FAA decision in 1995, Reed said he went to Chicago to talk with officials. Upon seeing he had a valid construction permit and operating permit, they said, “We didn’t know. The regulations don’t apply to you,” according to Reed.

But he has nothing in writing: “(The FAA doesn’t) admit mistakes,” he said.

For her part, Wean says she did call the FAA to town, but only because JM didn’t inform the FAA about its plans for the landfill.

“We gave (the FAA) enough evidence to do what they call a compatibility study,” she said.

She maintains that the FAA didn’t disapprove of the landfill because “(KCCA) pressed them into it. It was (Reed’s) failure to report they had a permit.”

Molinaro, the FAA spokesman, said he doesn’t know the details and can’t comment on this particular case.

According to Reed, JM informed the airport board of commissioners about its plans in a letter dated May 1996, six months after the disapproving one sent to JM by the FAA in November 1995.

The hidden costs

If the problem begins with birds, it ends with money.

The airport staff has already spent approximately $3,000 on legal fees fighting the landfill, Darlington said.

If JM Corp. begins work on the project, the board may have to file suit, Darlington said. Currently, JM and the Indiana Department of Environmental Management are in negotiations for a settlement.

For a city department facing increasing cutbacks, the prospect of a drawn-out legal battle is an ugly one.

“We’ll have to file compliance all along the way,” Darlington said.

In the end, the airport issue is still a murky one.

For her part, Wean said it’s a case of Anderson’s airport declining in quality.

“It is all a hot potato, jump and run, slap the responsibility off on somebody else, and then there’s an accident,” she said. “We’re sick of (officials passing the buck).”

On the other side, Reed says it’s an issue of overblown allegations.

“The FAA would like there to be nothing within five miles of an airport,” he said. “That’s just not the real world.”