Friedman Memorial Airport Redevelopment. Great Opportunity?

So what do you do with a former airport site in a small resort town?  Redevelop, of course.  Here are a few of the ideas the power’s that be including the City of Hailey have proposed as part of the master planned redevelopment.  Hotel and conference center.  Fitness Center.  Below grade trail connectors between the redevelopment and existing neighborhoods like Woodside.  Residential and Multi-Family housing units.  R & D Campus (INEL, for instance).  Institutional Campus or extension (University of Idaho?  Boise State?  BYU Sun Valley?).  Corporate Campus?  R&D/Corporate Campus.  Large Format Retail.

The only use category that received any negative feedback by the public and city officials was the large format retail.  Home Depot, Costco and Target don’t seem to sit well with a lot of locals.  I don’t think most of the big box retailers would chose to locate here anyway since we don’t have the population base to support a store of that size.