Why it is a matter of civic pride to NOT visit airport-ontario.com

I haven't written about Ontario International Airport (the airport referred to by some as "LA/Ontario International Airport") in almost two years, so I figured I'd better catch up on all of the latest news. To do so, I needed to find the airport website, so I conducted a Bing search to find it.

(Yes, a Bing search. If this Blogspot blog suddenly disappears, I guess you'll be able to figure out why.)

So I conducted my search, and found SEVERAL websites, several of which started with the letter "L" instead of the letter "O."

The first one, operated by Los Angeles World Airports, can be found at http://www.lawa.org/welcomeONT.aspx. Obviously, this is one of the sites that refers to the airport as "LA/Ontario International Airport." It has all sorts of local information, including the local weather, and a link to various news items. When I visited the site, the news item that displayed was the one about airport volunteers working at Dockweiler State Beach - which, for the record, is over 57 miles away from the airport, but really really really close to some other "LA" airport.

I found a second website at http://ontarioairport.org/. A website whose URL does not have the letters "LA," the site is...well, it's the exact same site as the one I previously mentioned, just with another URL. Ontario weather, Dockweiler State Beach, the whole bit.

And I found a third website, http://www.flyontario.com/. This website is also owned by Los Angeles World Airports, but displays some different content before redirecting you to the main LAWA web site.

And, of course, my Bing search also turned up http://setontariofree.com/ - which naturally does not use the "LA" designation for the airport (although "LA" is used on the site, mostly in anger).

Oh, and I found one other website at http://airport-ontario.com/.

It turns out that this website is NOT operated by any of the parties competing for the airport. If you perform a WHOIS search, you will find out that airport-ontario.com is operated by an anonymous private entity, who can be reached via AIRPORT-ONTARIO.COM [at] domainsbyproxy.com.

Well, it's obvious that the person or people operating airport-ontario.com are not local people, since the website prominently uses "LA" to refer to the airport. That cultural faux pas is, to some, the moral equivalent of serving a pork roast at a Jewish-Islamic intercultural event, or naming an ex-Burger King employee to head up a major McDonald's supplier.

Well, perhaps the operators of the website will hear that their website is only popular with people that live west of Interstate 710, and isn't really liked by people in Ontario itself.

Of course, this may not be true. Most people who end up at the website probably don't care about the letters "LA" that are all over the page. (And a few will question whether the airport is in Louisiana, or in Canada.) But, as the recent Federal budget showdown demonstrates, a few people are very capable of raising a really big stink.

Something that I was blogging about nearly ten years ago is finally about to happen

I'm spending the day marking my ten-year blogging anniversary by looking at some old posts that I've written over the past ten years.

And one of those old posts is rather timely.

If you've been in northwest Ontario lately, you've noticed that the construction of the area Walmart is nearly complete. I'm not certain of the opening date, but it's pretty clear that the store will be open in time for the shopping season.

Which, in a sense, is a miracle. If some people had had their way, that Walmart would never have been built. As it was, the project was delayed.

Why was the project delayed? Well, an organization called the "Ontario Mountain Village Association" mounted a fight against the Walmart, and the OMVA's website (which no longer exists) listed a number of arguments against the Walmart. Here are some of them:

Development of the Wal-Mart Supercenter must be stopped because:

It will draw additional traffic, noise and trash into our neighborhood.

The City does not need the revenue.

The Mom and Pop businesses do not need the "made in China" competition.

A 24-hour Super Center will act as a magnet to attract a dangerous criminal element into our neighborhood, especially from midnight until daybreak, seven days a week.

We, the voters and property owners, don't need 1,400 additional cars and trucks clogging the streets of our community every hour.

Back when the OMVA's website still existed and these arguments were still prominently displayed, I wrote a rebuttal to all of them (especially "The City does not need the revenue") in a blog post.

That blog post appeared in my Ontario Empoblog, an old blog that I used to write.

And just to show you how long this fight has been going on, that post was written on October 23, 2005.

I'm glad that Mr. and Mrs. Dave Taylor are still around to finally see the Walmart. I'm not sure what Anita Logue will do. Maybe she's helping the chairman of the Inland Oversight Committee.