When Systems Are Fragile, They Break. Here's What That Looks Like.
What did we think was going to happen?
In May 2016, I asked a series of hard questions about an airport water and sewer extension project here in my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. What’s our return on investment? What’s the long-term obligation we’re taking on? What does success even look like? These questions went unanswered.
More precisely: nobody in the decision-making process was interested in an answer. Not the city council. Not the city staff. Not the chamber of commerce, the regional development commission, or any number of vocal dignitaries who said the project was essential to our future growth and prosperity.
The project was a huge build-it-and-they-will-come gamble to run public utilities out to the airport on the far edge of town. The long list of project proponents freely exaggerated a soft mandate from the state's Fire Marshall to justify an over-engineered extension of water and sewer. Nearly a decade ago, the regional economic development group called it "critical... to the economic growth of our community" while the president of the chamber said it would create a "two-mile stretch that now becomes prime real estate for commercial development."
So where's all the new development? A decade later and we're still paying that public debt and still waiting to detect the pulse of a potential private-sector investment.
Only now, with proposed cuts from the Trump administration, we're again facing the prospect of an end to the feeble airport service whose existence anchored this entire gambit. The Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal includes a $308 million cut to the Essential Air Service (EAS) program, a federal initiative created after airline deregulation in 1978 to ensure that small and rural communities would retain commercial air service. The program subsidizes unprofitable routes to places like Brainerd—airports that wouldn’t exist in a free market due to low demand and their proximity to larger hubs.
The proposed budget nearly wipes out a subsidy that made up the majority of last year’s $349 million in federal spending on small and non-hub airports. According to the budget proposal: "The EAS program funnels taxpayer dollars to airlines to subsidize half-empty flights from airports that are within easy commuting distance from each other, while also failing to effectively provide assistance to most rural air travelers."
It goes on to note that "spending on [EAS] programs is out of control, more than doubling between 2021 and 2025" and proposes reforms to "adjust eligibility and subsidy rates to help rural communities’ air transportation needs in a more sustainable manner." This move is reigniting panic, not just in my city, but in rural cities across the country.
Yet, none of this should be a surprise. In fact, it should be the moment we stop pretending we didn’t see this coming.
In January 2018, I wrote an article about Essential Air Service. I said then that it was "a bottomless pit of subsidies that drain critical resources from struggling communities while fomenting a distracted delusion of imminent prosperity, if we only believe.” That delusion—that federal dollars would keep flowing indefinitely, and that prosperity was just one more grant away—has shaped years of local decision-making, especially around airports, especially for smaller cities.
The federal government invites struggling places to trade more of their stability for a chance of growth. Maybe the national GDP gets a temporary boost. Maybe. In exchange, local governments get a ribbon cutting followed by decades of unpayable liability.
This was always going to end poorly.
For years, we’ve treated our small regional airport like it was a core pillar of our local economy. It’s not. I fly more than almost anyone I know in Brainerd—and I haven’t flown out of our airport in years. It’s not convenient, it’s not reliable, and even when subsidized, it’s rarely cheaper. I drive or I take the shuttle to Minneapolis-St. Paul instead. So do lots of people. That service runs dozens of trips a day with no subsidy. The airport runs two flights.
And yet, we’ve poured money into our airport like it’s our lifeline.
We’ve built and expanded with no real business case, no return-on-investment calculations, and certainly no plan for what happens if the subsidies dry up. The water and sewer extension to the airport—originally estimated at $7 million but ultimately ballooning to nearly double that—was never about safety or basic services. It was sold as growth. As investment. As momentum.
But what we were really doing was building fragility. We were expanding a non-adaptable system that only works under a very narrow set of conditions: consistent state and federal support, cheap borrowing, and a public that doesn’t ask too many questions. We told ourselves the airport was becoming self-sustaining and profitable while it was receiving $80 per passenger in subsidies (even more today). We told ourselves that 20,000 boardings a year was impressive while the road in front of the airport carries more than that many vehicles on a busy summer day.
We spoke of the airport as an economic artery when, in reality, it served fewer people than a handful of shuttle vans. The story we told ourselves about the airport was never grounded in reality—it was aspirational, performative, and deeply misleading. We let ourselves believe because we wanted to believe. And now the thin thread of subsidy supporting this illusion is threatened.
As I said, this was always going to end poorly.
The last time Donald Trump was in office, his administration proposed cutting EAS for the exact same reasons: high cost per passenger, airports near major hubs, and low utilization. We should have taken the hint then. Instead, we borrowed more, built more, and dug in deeper.
What happens next is predictable. Programs that rely on outsized subsidies eventually collapse—or hollow out in slow motion. Either way, local governments are left with the infrastructure, the debt, and none of the benefits. And in the meantime, we here in Brainerd have a deeply negative net financial position and our infrastructure maintenance is deeply underfunded. We continue to struggle to invest in things that actually improve the day-to-day lives of residents.
The lesson here isn’t that we should fight harder to protect Essential Air Service. It’s that we should have built a town that didn’t need it.
Strong towns are resilient. They don’t bet everything on federal money and fragile systems. They grow from the bottom up, incrementally, with a feedback loop between public investment and community value. They don’t build for prestige. They build for people.
In Brainerd, we had the chance to learn this lesson gently. Now we’ll learn it the hard way.
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Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.