My regular readers know that I frequently complain about the low quality of government at the local level. I not only complain about the political absurdity of a socialist San Francisco city government that tries to run our individual lives as a parent rather than as a competent government. I complain that the government is incompetent at doing things that are needed.
I woke up one morning and realized my approach is wrong. I know how to make government work. I took my two main government tasks and asked myself how to use existing structures to solve the problems. We lack individuals who care and know how to make changes.
The first task that needs being solved is the San Francisco airport. (The second one is in the next blog). We have two landing runways and two take off runways at a 90° angle. On days when the cloud cover is too low, which is common in San Francisco, the two landing runways are too close together for the regular 60 landings per hour. With low clouds landings are reduced to 30 per hour. That consequently reduces the number of flights leaving the airport too.
The two landing runways could be expanded easily by expanding into the adjacent bay.
The environmental organizations that control the bay prohibited this. The current airport political organizations have looked into the issue and always deferred to the power of the environmental political groups.
If the airport were run on a lease to a private company, the private company could easily resolve the expansion of the runway problem. The private companies could offer hundreds of acres of currently used salt flats to replace the dozens of acres needed for the airport runway expansion. How do we get private management of the airport?
The same way BART was created. By local initiative. It took two elections for the BART initiative to pass.
San Francisco owns the airport and manages it even though it is in San Mateo County. We only need a local initiative in San Francisco directing the San Francisco Airport Commission to lease the airport to a private company. There are several that run airports around the world.
The initiative must be very carefully written to make sure that it does not get commandeered by politicians looking for a cushy job. That will cost about $100,000 in legal fees.
An initiative in an off year election will cost another $100,000.
That's how we can do it. For $200,000 we can have a world-class functioning airport that does not shut down every time the fog rolls in.