THE PLANE FACTS: Not moving this airfield would limit the design of a new Columbia River Crossing. IMAGE: MAP courtesy of Google Earth, INSET courtesy City of Vancouver

If the $4.2 billion Columbia River Crossing project moves forward, the design for its signature element—a new 12-lane bridge between Portland and Vancouver—will be dictated by a rinky-dink airport.

That facility, Vancouver’s Pearson Field Airport, ranked 23rd out of 30 in Washington for total number of flight operations in 2006, according to FAA figures. To put that in perspective, Pearson’s 48,506 flight takeoffs and landings in 2006 totaled about 20 percent of the volume that Hillsboro Airport handled in 2006.

And none of the Pearson flights provided passenger service to the public, which means what’s essentially a private club would dictate the design of the biggest proposed public works project in Northwest history (see “Bridge Over the River Why,” WW, May 21, 2008) .

At issue is the flight path for the privately owned planes that land at Pearson, which is owned by the city of Vancouver. If the bridge is designed with features rising more than 30 feet above the roadway, it will intrude on Pearson’s airspace, a conflict prohibited by FAA regulations.

There are no plans to relocate the airfield, which is immediately east of the current crossing, elsewhere in Clark County’s vast open spaces. Oregon officials wonder why.

“If we’re talking about a bi-state investment in a project with a 100-year life, I think the location of the airfield has to be on the table,” says Portland City Planning Director Gil Kelley, who is helping Portland’s planning commission prepare for a June 10 vote on the project. “If the bridge is going to be built—and the Planning Commission still has a lot of questions about the project—it represents an opportunity for a great statement not only about commerce and transportation but about sustainability and about beauty.”

But in Washington—source for most of the traffic congestion driving the proposed project—there’s not much interest in moving the airport.

“We’re not going to give up Pearson,” says Vancouver Mayor Royce Pollard. “It’ll never happen. If it didn’t have federal protection maybe we’d talk about it, but it’s a dead issue.”

Here’s the explicit guidance from the draft Environmental Impact Statement released by proponents of the CRC project on May 2: “An important goal of the CRC project is to minimize effects of the crossing to both Columbia River navigation and air navigation from Pearson field.”

Pearson has at least two things going for it: The city of Vancouver says it is the oldest continuously operating airfield in the United States, and it is located in the 366-acre Vancouver National Historic Reserve.

The deference to Pearson is even more remarkable, considering that a 2005 airport business plan drawn up for the City of Vancouver says the Vancouver City Council decided in 1972 to close the airport by 2002. Only a 1994 agreement with the National Park Service—and an annual payment of $150,000 from the Federal Aeronautics Administration—keeps Pearson afloat.

And it’s not as if Pearson, which is about five miles from Portland International Airport, could someday provide commercial service for Clark County’s rapidly increasing population (413,000 in 2006, according to U.S. Census data, up 20 percent from 2000).

The airport cannot grow, the draft EIS says, “because it is surrounded by developed urban uses and the Vancouver National Historic Reserve.”

For the CRC bridge project to move forward, eight government agencies in Washington and Oregon must agree. (One of those agencies, Metro, signaled on Tuesday that the bridge may be in trouble. Three of seven councillors backed a no-build option.) And more importantly, the two states’ legislatures and the federal government must create a financing plan for the $4.2 billion.

But setting aside questions of whether the bridge is an effective use of scarce dollars or complies with carbon-emissions reduction goals, there’s another question. If the bridge is going to be built, even skeptics want a Golden Gate-style landmark rather than a merely functionary highway bridge, such as the Glenn Jackson bridge on I-205.

“If we’re going to spend a ton of money on something that’s going to have a great visual impact, we should do better than the lowest common denominator,” says Ethan Seltzer, director of Portland State University’s School of Urban Studies and Planning and a critic of the project. “We’re allowing Pearson to dictate the decision that this bridge will look like a beached aircraft carrier.”