Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration is getting closer to answering a question that has challenged Cleveland mayors for decades: Should the city close Burke Lakefront Airport to make way for a park or other development?
Top city officials planned to meet Monday afternoon to discuss when and how to roll out a decision, Signal Cleveland had learned. But they canceled the meeting because Jeffrey Epstein, City Hall’s chief of integrated development, was stuck in City Council’s daylong committee hearing.
Epstein told Signal Cleveland on Tuesday that officials still need to review the data from two nearly completed studies on the possibility of closing Burke. One study examines the regulatory and technical side of closing the airport. The other looks at the economic impact.
“We have not made a decision yet on Burke,” he said. “We’re still kind of evaluating final drafts of the studies that have come in.”
City Hall has not yet made those studies available to the public. A City Council spokesperson said council had not yet received an update from the administration on the airport’s future.
Bibb said during his 2021 campaign that he wanted to close the airport, which occupies roughly 450 acres of prime land on the Lake Erie shore. Previous mayors have chosen not to pursue the closure, which could be costly and take years to accomplish.
“The mayor has always been leaning towards closure from before we started the studies,” Epstein said of Bibb. “I think he’s been clear that we wanted to take a hard look at this.”
Whether the City Hall moves to close the airport or not, it will need to communicate its decision to a broad number of people. Epstein said City Council will have a say. Other stakeholders to inform could include leaseholders at the airport, business leaders who use it for travel, hospitals and neighboring institutions like the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Any move to close Burke would involve government agencies including the Federal Aviation Administration and the Army Corps of Engineers.
