Dead issue? Live issue? Who knows?

The issue of the airport proposal of late 2007 will bleed into 2008 and probably beyond.

Anderson Mayor Kris Ockomon recently declared the issue dead for the city of Anderson, but that doesn’t mean it’s dead for the rest of the county.

The town of Fishers wants to relocate the Indianapolis Metropolitan Airport to southern Madison County. But doing so would require paving over thousands of acres of farmland. Suffice to say, there’s a lot of resistance to the idea.

But at this stage, sources have said, it’s just an idea. A private Indianapolis-based company, Aerofinity, drafted a report about what an airport would look like in southern Madison County. That’s the most concrete piece of the airport puzzle available.

Sources have said that if a town like Lapel or Pendleton wanted to annex the land proposed for the airport (which lies in unincorporated land in Green and Stony Creek townships), it could decide to build the airport.

But for now, a new airport in Madison County has not been cleared for takeoff. Even if the land was allocated by a government, there would be levels of bureaucracy to be trudged through, and some say getting the airport built could take as long as 10 years.