Androids from The MEA Group, the same consultants who started this process some two years ago by excluding residents as "stakeholders" in their information gathering process, were giving vast amounts of information to the citizens of Venice, albeit not in any manner that could be understood or digested. PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide, with a droned verbatim reading, had the net effect of hypnotizing the crowd into a Prozac stupor.

It's important to note that learning institutions like Yale and even government agencies like NASA have condemned PowerPoint as a communications crutch, with NASA making the statement that PowerPoint makes audiences stupid. I am certain that MEA has seen some of these studies, which in turn speaks volumes about their attitude towards Venice citizens (list of reference links).

The end result of MEA's PowerPoint show was evident in the Q&A session after the presentation. Citizen after citizen repeated the same questions that have been hounding city hall over the past months. Why was the traffic count given to the FAA an obviously inflated fictional number? Why can't we have a B-II airport? Why do the safety areas have to impinge into the golf course? And on and on and on. All of the questions were based on answers that the MEA Group had already provided during the PowerPoint somnambulism portion of the meeting.

The whole event was incredibly frustrating, with neither side having any greater understanding at its conclusion. Outside the community center, several residents, whom I had never met before, literally surrounded me at the end of the meeting to ask the same questions that had just been asked inside the building. What is alarming here is that nobody from city hall was available at that time to perform the same function and I don't want to be city hall's unpaid spokesman. Aren't we actually paying someone to do that?

Clearly, something is very wrong.

Carlucci filled in enough gaps for me to come to the understanding that the whole argument over whether or not the Venice Municipal Airport is a B-II or a C-II is a huge red herring. It doesn't matter. Reason: the same class of airplanes in the same numbers are going to land at the airport whether it's a B-II or a C-II. From a purely functional perspective, there is no substantive difference between the two classifications. The only thing that would make any difference is if the runways were shortened to conform to the upper limits of a B-II classification, something that Carlucci insisted that the FAA would flat out not allow.

MEA tried to tell the crowd that shortening the runways was not an option. They even pointed to some info on a PowerPoint slide and read it verbatim. One resident later demanded it anyway and the audience burst into applause. Carlucci groaned and put his head in his hands in frustration. I looked around for the MEA control board, maybe I could sabotage this meltdown by simply switching the robots into sing-and-dance mode.

I asked Carlucci if he'd be willing to do a podcast interview. He said he'd think about it.

One paragraph's worth of information from Carlucci was far more valuable and meaningful than anything that came out of MEA's androids.

The object free areas and safety zones were another contentious set of topics that were of interest to the attending crowd. These are the areas at either ends of the runways that are shaped like the painted under-the-basket zones in Olympics basketball. The areas are currently anything but object free. There's all kinds of stuff in them -- the four-lane draw bridge known as the Circus Bridge, parts of Harbor Drive, approximately 20 houses in the Gulf Shores neighborhood, a driving range for golfers, parts of the Intracoastal Waterway, etc. About the only thing that isn't in them is an Iraqi baby formula factory.

An MEA android insisted that none of this will be any problem at all as the FAA will likely provide the variances as a matter of course. Not a soul in the building believed her. Carlucci concurred and whispered as much to me, along with some enlightening explanatory background that the rest of the audience never got a chance to hear. I believed him.

Here's the problem. The MEA Group, as spokes-androids for the city, are required to inform the public as part of the FAA approval process. They are apparently not required to do so in any way that can be readily understood by the average citizen who is not a city hall information junkie. City hall gets to pat itself on the back for a job well done while in agreement that the public is comprised of total idiots and therefore are incapable of deciding what is good for them. The fact that MEA and city hall have lost their credibility in this process was not lost on me -- when citizens that I've never met are seeking me out to get answers, city hall has lost them, probably forever.

As to city hall's function? Propaganda Minister Pam Johnson (who one council member informed me was the recent recipient of a $9,000 annual raise in pay -- for what, nobody seems clear on) dutifully handed out copies of the Venice Gondolier's Sunday airport info insert, thus turning the Gondo's publication into the official publication of the 2007 City Airport Yawnathons. Which makes sense as roughly half of the information in the insert was taken verbatim from MEA's PowerPoint slides. Other than that, she stood around and earned her pay by.. well, standing around.

City Manager Marty Black popped in for about fifteen minutes and then got the hell out of there before anyone could tag him. Nobody ever said Black was stupid.