Well, Burlington City Council went ahead and did something that it had no good reason to do, and had no choice but to do.

The topic of this riddle: Council’s approval of a 25-year extension of the Vermont Air National Guard’s lease at Burlington International Airport. A lease that wasn’t due to expire until The Year Of Our Lord 2048, which is so far in the future that Gov. Phil Scott doesn’t mind planning to cut greenhouse gas emissions by then.

Now that the lease will run until 2073, I guess the VTANG can go ahead and buy green bananas and renew their magazine subscriptions. (Surely they’ve got a coffee table in the break room littered with old copies of Aviation Week & Space Technology, Janes Defence Weekly, Combat Aircraft Journal, and such.)

Really, it was pointless. But Council was forced to act by the rules about federal airbase spending. See, the feds won’t invest in ANG bases with less than 25 years remaining on their leases. And airports like St. Patrick Leahy Memorial International are dependent on the infrastructure improvements that money will buy.

It all works together, and not for the good of anyone outside the military-industrial-aviatic complex.

The obvious component of this mess is the military angle. Burlington and Vermont want to retain a robust Air National Guard presence because, you know, jobs and economic activity. And federal defense spending will help keep the airport vibrant. According to Seven Days, the lease extension “will allow the base to qualify for up to $51 million in federal spending over the next five years.” The money will improve the base, and the airport. Plus, the Guard provides $3 million annually in firefighting services for the airport. If the Guard went away or dwindled, the city would nave to pick up the tab.

This is one small example of how the military has woven its way into every corner of America, thus making itself all but immune to budget cuts. The military has a much broader and less efficient domestic footprint than it should because every single installation in a Congressional district helps secure votes at budget time. Which is why you’ll never hear any of our Congresscritters (h/t Jerry Pournelle*), not even Bernie Sanders, publicly criticize the VTANG or the much-despised F-35s.

*I was dead certain it was Molly Ivins until I looked it up. Rule of thumb: No quotation was ever said by the person it’s commonly attributed to.

And this is only part of the Great National Scam that is our air travel system. There are fuel subsidies that keep us addicted to fossil fuels. And then there’s the U.S. Transportation Department’s “Essential Air Service” system, which heavily underwrites passenger service to small regional airports like those in Rutland and Lebanon, NH. The feds subsidize air carriers to use these places, supposedly because their areas simply can’t survive without air service. (Vintage writeup of the Lebanon business available at Green Mountain Daily.)

What kind of service do they get? A single airline (only one carrier per airport gets the subsidy) operating a handful of flights to a single destination. In the case of Rutland, three departures per day to Boston. That’s it. Essential Air Service is arguably a good thing if it brings service to places like Bemidji, Minnesota or Glendive, Montana, where the nearest big airport is hours away, but c’mon, Rutland is not that far from Burlington or Albany and Lebanon is a hop and a skip from Manchester, NH.

What Essential Air Service really does is maintain and improve airports for general aviation. You know, the private planes owned by corporations and rich people.

Once when I was doing a story on the Lebanon airport, its manager told me that “Airports inherently lose money.” Market forces would not support the system as it exists. Massive quantities of public sector funds make it possible.

Now, you can make arguments that airports and air service are public goods (in addition to being welfare for the wealthy). In fact, there is not a transportation system on God’s green Earth that pays for itself. Nothing wrong with that. But this is what I think about whenever someone gripes about subsidizing passenger rail or local public transit. They’re subsidizing everything from sidewalks to streets, highways, railways, ferries, and passenger air.

What would our transportation mix look like if we made sensible investment decisions? I think it’d be a lot different. It would certainly serve far more people far more equitably than our present, air- and highway-heavy cocktail.

Well, I’ve wandered pretty far from last night’s VTANG vote, but I wanted to set the context. Any community is under pressure to maintain or (preferably) expand air service capacity in its jurisdiction for fear of losing — here we go — jobs and economic activity. You don’t want to be the mayor or councilor who oversaw the loss or diminishment of your airport. The feds are dangling all that cash in front of your nose.

What are you going to do? You’re going to negotiate face-saving but meaningless noise-reduction language to placate the subset of voters who care about that. You’re going to hold your nose and vote “Yes.” And you’re going to mutter platitudes about The Price Of Progress whenever an F-35 thunders overhead.

Or you’re a Progressive on Council. In that case you’ll cast a principled vote against the lease without facing the potential consequences of your vote because you’re in the minority. You won’t have to explain to air travelers or the business community why there are fewer flights out of BTV or its facilities aren’t improving. You won’t have to find money in the budget for airport firefighting. You’ll be the people’s hero, and you won’t have to manage without the federal airbase funding or the Air Guard itself. You can complain about the machine. And you’ll still be swallowed up in its gears.