Happy New Year!

Fly Like an Eagle... twice daily to Atlanta

Kudos to the Telegraph who put Travis Fain’s well researched and informative story on the Middle Georgia Regional Airport at the top of the Sunday, December 30^th edition. They avoided the temptation to obliterate the front page with their list of top ten news stories from the past year. If you haven’t read it yet, Mr. Fain says the airport is still in a pickle. Delta and ASA want out but can’t go because the Feds won’t let them. The grant Ellis secured in an effort to bring a new route to D.C. can’t be used because it’d create competition for the Delta/ASA partnership that already wants to leave. More interestingly, Fain says the airport has averaged about 40 passengers a day this year, down from a high of 100 a day just a couple years ago. Meanwhile, the company the city hired to take care of the airport, TBI Airport Management, remains very optimistic that there is a solid market for the airport in Macon despite all the signs that point to the contrary. They claim to have done amazing work in Orlando so it’s hard to completely dismiss them. Either way, this should be an interesting year for our little airport.

Telegraph publisher PJ Browning is leaving

A while back, someone pointed out that one reason the news here so often sucks is that reporters, television and print, use Macon as a stepping stone. The size of the “metropolitan” area is large enough to look good—demographics wise—to potential future employers and so our city makes for a good middle stage for enterprising journalists. It hurts in a couple ways. One: some of the journalists never become really engaged in the community, already having their eye on a bigger position elsewhere, and two: the folks who do get involved and then leave are sorely missed. The Telegraph’s latest publisher, PJ Browning, is one of the latter. She was on several major boards and, from all appearances, had really put herself to good use in Macon. She’s going to Myrtle Beach, and she will be missed, no doubt. The next publisher will have big shoes to fill… if they want to. If they don’t want to, they’ll probably still move on to a bigger paper somewhere else in a couple years.

Random rant…
Macon has always looked like a mostly blank canvas to me. Instead of painting on it, folks just bitch and moan that there’s nothing much on the canvas. That’s a point that this paper has harped on for a while, but I want to start harping on a new one in the same vein. I see plenty of people using Macon for their own gain and then leaving, but I also see plenty who use it for their own advantage because so few are getting involved. They don’t often actually add much to the community as a whole, but they’re all over the place on boards and at non-profits. It just looks good on their resume, and that’s why they do it. Yeah, it bugs me that those people do it, but it bugs me more that we let them. How easy is it to really get involved? Very! There have been several seats on City Council in the past couple cycles that people just walked up and put their names on without having to actually run against anyone. (Note: I’m not suggesting that the individuals who did are abusing anything for their own gain, just making a point about how easily someone can get involved at even that high a level.) Seriously, it’s so much easier to jump into something here than it is almost anywhere else because most of us are content to wait on someone else to do the work. Think about that next time you’re getting ready to complain. Remember, you’re a part of Macon, not apart from it.