Almost everyone agrees that improvements are urgently needed to provide additional capacity at the Airport. Unfortunately, Cleveland's poor management of expansion has resulted in numerous delays and setbacks. But it took almost two more years for Cleveland to draft an expansion plan. Even with Brook Park's support, and after more than four years of planning, Cleveland has yet to release the legally required assessment of environmental impacts and its plans for mitigating them. Because of poor planning and scheduling by Cleveland, the FAA has repeatedly pushed back the schedule for its approval of the expansion plan.
Final approval remains months, perhaps years away.
Although Cleveland has known for several years that some of the NASA campus will be needed for expansion, transfer of this property remains years off. This delay has forced Cleveland to abandon plans the build a needed full-length runway immediately in favor of building a new runway in two stages, increasing costs and delaying completion by many years. Cleveland has failed to take a hard look at the future need of the region. Cleveland has not engaged the local or regional communities to reach a consensus on how to meet regional needs. Even though everyone agrees that the Airport needs to be expanded, Cleveland can't make up its mind about how to implement that expansion.