Something old, something new, something borrowed... this portion of the old recipe for a successful wedding is also being used in the desert southwest where the Albuquerque Aerostat Ascension Association (AAAA or "the Quad-A"), the world’s largest balloon club is working to establish not only a successful wedding, but a lifelong marriage between balloonists and local landowners.
For Albuquerque the problems are no different but the approach must be, dictated by the sheer numbers and scale of ballooning operations in and around the city. Throughout the year at least three separate organizations are involved in ballooning operations in the city... there is the annual Fiesta of course, plus Top Gun (a competition club) and the Quad A itself. Plus there is a variety of balloon schools, ride operators and sport flyers. Altogether this makes for thousands of LTA operations each year, everyone fraught with the chance for landowner disaster. That ballooning enjoys the success it does in Albuquerque is no small tribute to the efforts of all of these organizations, notable among them is the Quad A’s Landowner Relations Committee.
Open the phone company Yellow Pages in Albuquerque and the very first listing you find is ‘AAAA Landowner Hotline.’ Granted it is by virtue of the AAAA’s that this is so but how many communities can even boast of a landowner hotline, much less top billing in the phone directory.
"The hotline has been around for about four years now," says AAAA LOR Committee Chairman Rick Lujan, "and its success is undeniable." Lujan and his five other committee members have worked through the past few years to establish themselves as the first line of contact between unhappy landowners and responsible, yet sometimes unsuspecting pilots.
"The most important element in any landowner situation," says Lujan, "is remembering that the landowner is always right. You cannot go into any mediation or negotiation with the attitude that you are going to argue with the landowner. Maybe it is just dirt the landowner is growing, but it is their dirt, and it is their right to ask you to stay off of it if they so choose."
In most cases all any landowner wants is to explain their concerns and they want
someone to listen. A pilot accosted by an accusatory landowner is not always in the
best of moods to listen. Thus the hotline allows Lujan or one of his committee members
to enter the situation as mediators.
"Our role is never to assess blame," says Lujan. "Instead we want to facilitate a happy resolution of whatever the problem might have been. Usually, once the landowner has had a chance to let off some steam, the problem disappears. Occasionally we have to get the pilot and landowner together for a follow-up discussion. Only twice have we had situations involving monetary disbursement. Once the guilty pilot paid up. In the other occasion the responsible pilot failed to come forward, so the club took up a collection and contributed that toward the landowner’s damages."
Lujan and his committee members are each armed with business cards and flyers which they post at every opportunity trying to get the phone number out to more and more people. Already the Albuquerque police, fire and FAA have recognized the AAAA LOR Committee as a responsible body and the first line of contact upon receipt of a landowner complaint.
Ironically this phone number serves a dual purpose, while helping cool off a heated situation between landowner and pilot, it also serves as a first contact point for many people wanting to know more about ballooning and how they can become involved in the sport.
While the landowner hotline has and continues to work well, the Quad A recently has gone a step further with its new "Meet the Landowner" public relations campaign.
"Plain and simple, this is a people campaign," explains Lujan. "We want the Albuquerque community to know that we are good neighbors, that we are responsible citizens who want to continue to enjoy our sport while contributing to the quality of life in our town," he says.
To meet the landowner, AAAA pilots are being supplied with landowner cards patterned after those developed by the Balloon Association of Greater Illinois (Balloon Life, February 1995). Armed with these cards, pilots are encouraged to get out of their baskets and chase vehicles and make it a point to introduce themselves and their crew to anyone who might be around at takeoff and/or landing, especially landowners.
"Again our point is simply to let landowners know that we are their neighbors; that we are interested in their concerns and that we can be responsive to their problems. In return we have an opportunity to meet and talk with them about ballooning, explaining to them the importance of open lands and reasonable access so that we might continue to enjoy our sport," Lujan says.
As incentive for the pilots to participate in the program, each landowner card returned to the club earns the pilot and the landowner a bottle of champagne and two champagne flutes. At year’s end, a drawing will be conducted with the winning pilot and landowner receiving a stained glass reproduction of the balloon the two have shared.
A second part of this campaign involves an outreach program by club members, highlighted by an increasing number of volunteer tethers and other educational displays about ballooning, especially for city schools. "We’re up to about one a month now," says Lujan. Thanks to this effort balloons have even been invited to participate in career days at area schools which provides a unique opportunity to expose the youth of Albuquerque to ballooning.
The two programs alone might be more than many regional clubs could handle, but Lujan and his committee are not going to get caught watching the grass grow in Albuquerque. Already they are studying the feasibility of a new LOR concept, that of a LOR seminar. The idea would be patterned after the successful safety seminars developed for aviation. AAAA pilots would be afforded the opportunity to attend an annual LOR seminar with sessions on how to approach landowners, how to defuse hostile confrontations, etc. Each attendee would receive a LOR certificate. In return Lujan says they are looking to establish some benefit to the pilot, such as an insurance reduction or perhaps a rebate on rally entry fees. (A similar program in the UK requires pilots to show proof of attending such a seminar prior to being accepted into area festivals. Something similar might evolve in Albuquerque where local pilots participate in many AAAA events in addition to the world famous Fiesta.)
For any of these programs to succeed requires the participation of pilots and the various ballooning organizations in Albuquerque. To accomplish this the AAAA, Fiesta and Top Gun all work together on the Albuquerque PZ map. Indeed, it is the AAAA LOR Committee that provides the legwork each year to verify boundaries of the red and yellow PZs found on the Fiesta pilot map. And to work better with Top Gun, Lujan says efforts are underway to assign GPS coordinates to each PZ and have this information printed on the pilot maps as well.
If there is an overriding theme to all of the efforts by the AAAA LOR Committee it is to establish within the community at large a sense of the value ballooning contributes to the quality of life in Albuquerque. This was the case in the Rio Rancho area when Lujan’s committee, landowners and various officials conducted a series of meetings that led to the establishment of Rio Rancho Balloon Park, a 40 acre multi-use facility where balloons are expressly requested to launch and/or land thus allowing balloonists and landowners to peacefully coexist.
