Opinion: Coonskin Park is the Price of Progress
About a mile and a quarter into Coonskin Park along the Elk River, you’ll see a sign to your left indicating the head of the Alice Knight Memorial Trail, one of several trails winding through the rich woodlands at the top of Coonskin. These will all be destroyed in the next few years – along with the picnic areas and forty percent of the park itself – if the proposed runway expansion project at the West Virginia Yeager International Airport proceeds as planned.
The expansion project hinges upon a predicted increase in air travel into and out of Yeager over the next fifteen years, out to 2037. The project’s technical report refers to this as the high forecast demand, meaning it’s predicting the maximum amount of increased passenger traffic and using that guess to justify proceeding with both the project and the consequent destruction of Coonskin Park. While it’s certainly important to consider longer time scales and worst-case scenarios for an engineering project of this magnitude, the real data behind it simply don’t make sense.
Let’s look at the area Yeager serves – Kanawha County specifically, and West Virginia more generally. According to the US Census Bureau, the population of West Virginia declined by 3.2% from 2010 to 2020. We were only one of three states in the entire country to lose residents in that time period, a change substantial enough for us to lose a seat in the House of Representatives. Kanawha County specifically lost 17,000 residents, a decline of 8.8%. (And Charleston’s population declined 4.9%.) The state’s maximum population, two million, was reached in 1950 – over seventy years ago. Yet for some reason, the high forecast demand claims over 700,000 passengers per year will filter through Yeager in 2037, an increase of almost 56% over the 2019 passenger count of 450,000. I’m not sure how an airport will see that amount of rapid growth in a state whose population has been in slow decline over the last seventy years.
Another part of this project involves revamping the existing terminal buildings and structures making up the Yeager infrastructure. One ironically touted benefit of this is it’s an opportunity to highlight, through art and decor, all the things that make West Virginia great. Things that we, her people, sometimes lose sight of in our daily lives – such as the unspoiled wilderness around us and beautiful rolling mountainsides and forests. The very things that the proposed airport expansion project, if it continues, will utterly destroy.
As you hike along the Alice Knight Memorial Trail, it loops around the top of the park and back, and near the end, you’ll see a small waterfall as Coonskin Branch tumbles about fifteen feet down to the forest floor and continues on gently toward the Elk River. Coonskin Branch, under the auspices of the Yeager expansion project, would become a trickle along the bottom of a concrete culvert, devoid of life and manufactured, but deemed an acceptable loss in the hopes that West Virginia benefits from an expanded airport serving a decreasing population.
Spoiler alert: it won’t, nor will its residents who enjoy Coonskin’s unspoiled beauty.
