B

ali Governor Made Mangku Pastika has set July 7 as the deadline for the special team tasked with selecting the location of a new airport in North Bali to announce its decision.

Pastika wants to put an end to the prolonged uncertainty about the planned airport, expected to boost his administration'€™s efforts to distribute the wealth brought by tourism to the island'€™s less fortunate regions.

'€œThe plan must be realized and the airport should be built in north Bali. We will work very hard to transform the plan into reality,'€ he said after a meeting on the airport on Tuesday.

'€œThe team will discuss the best site for the airport. Currently, we have Kubutambahan and Gerokgak as the two viable sites. The team should make the decision on July 7 as we will have a meeting with officials at the Transportation Ministry on July 9,'€ he stressed.

The plan had been discussed for several years. In fact, several private parties conducted feasibility studies, including a study funded by the Bali administration and carried out by PT Wiswakarma Konsulindo.

The studies focused on several nominated sites: Kubutambahan, Sangsit and Gerokgak in Buleleng regency; Kubu in Karangasem regency; and Jembrana regency in West Bali. The studies concluded that the best sites for the planned commercial airport were Sumberkima village in Gerokgak district and Kubutambahan and Bungkulan villages in Kubutambahan district.

The studies, however, also identified several major problems that the local administration would have to seriously address before they moved forward with the plan.

In Kubutambahan village, for instance, as many as 14 temples and two cultural heritages stand on the site proposed for the new airport. Moreover, the sites in Bungkulan and Kubutambahan are populated with thousands of households, all of which would be significantly affected by the airport construction.

In Sumberkima, a formation of high hills around the village would pose a headache for the airport planners. Pastika said that the new airport was critical for his administration'€™s efforts to close the wealth gap that separates the rich regions in the south with less well-off regions on the island. '€œIf necessary, we will cut into the hill or reclaim the sea to build the airport.'€

It would be an ambitious project since the plan shows the airport would be much bigger than the existing Ngurah Rai International Airport in Tuban, Kuta. The planned airport will need more than 1,000 hectares of land and is designed to have two runways.

The plan to build a second airport on the island was announced several years ago by the then-tourism minister Jero Wacik, in anticipation of the growing number of tourists to the resort island.

Data from PT Angkasa Pura I, the operator of Ngurah Rai International Airport, has shown that the number of passengers and flights has continually increased.

It is also being said that the planned new airport would gradually overtake Ngurah Rai in terms of traffic, since the latter faces land-constraint problems that prevent the operator from extending its runway.

However, the plan has gone from the hottest issue for the island'€™s tourist industry to an enigmatic proposal following years of bureaucratic uncertainty and a lack of serious investors.