My family lives very close to the Sky Ranch Airport. We have enjoyed the peace and quiet of southern Spanish Valley for more than 20 years. We always thought that we were sort of “lucky” that we were located in San Juan County where we could live a life without an omnipresent bureaucracy scrutinizing everything in our rural neighborhood like happens in the “big” city. Recently we have seen the other side of that coin as Mike Bynum has re-invented Sky Ranch Airport before our eyes with no apparent oversight or restriction from the county. What was once a small ranch airstrip with only casual and infrequent visits by curious aircraft, has, after a period of five or six years of outright abandonment, become a potential nightmare for residents of Spanish Valley. Hundreds of tons of dirt has been moved and new asphalt added as the old ranch airstrip has been expanded, obviously in preparation for something much bigger and more invasive, but with no public planning process. No one puts that much money into an airport in the middle of an existing residential neighborhood without hoping to be able to utilize it to the fullest. San Juan County and its consultant Landmark Design need to consider the many negative impacts of an active airport in the middle of its dreams for a new small city in Spanish Valley. The noise and safety concerns of an airport there will forever affect the options of the county and its planners to place schools, senior centers, parks and other assemblages of people in the path of arriving and departing aircraft. The existing residents of Spanish Valley should be able to rely on the county’s zoning laws to be protected from incompatible developments like Sky Ranch Airport.
