Burt Newsome told the Spalding County Commissioners to “make decision and let me get on with my life.”

Newsome lives on 30 acres on Sapelo Road, which is part of the proposed location for the new airport. During citizens' comments at Monday’s regular meeting, which followed the called meeting on the changes to the future land use map for the new airport, Newsome told the commissioners “the county is in the position it is now because of lack of planning for the future.”

He said, “my problem is it’s been four years y’all have had us on a string, jerking us around like marionettes” about the new airport. “Nobody is going to buy the land from us because of the pending airport, and I don’t want to fix it up because I won’t get what I put in.”

Newsome told the commissioners, “the mental stress, knowing somebody is gonna come take your home. I’m tired of it, we’re all tired of it.”

He said, “you’ve been sitting on the pot for years. Make a decision or get off the pot. You’ve got me calf-roped out there.”

He repeated, “Make a decision, let me get on with my life. All I am is in a holding pattern.”

Newsome said, “I can’t sell, nobody will buy it. Make a decision, please. The stress is unbearable, the not knowing.”

At the end of the meeting, Commission Chairman Gwen Flowers-Taylor said Newsome’s comments, “for me, were very agonizing. I really wish we had some power to do something.”

She said she wanted “to impress on the Airport Authority to better communicate (what’s going on). He sounded very anguished.”

She asked the Airport Authority to “give residents something to move on. That’s not something unreasonable.”

The city and county have plans for the airport, have an airport authority in place to operate it and the authority, city and county can be reimbursed 90 percent for buying the land and building the airport. But the airport authority has been told by the Georgia Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration, it has bring the land to the table first.

With the failure of the transportation sales tax, the airport authority does not have any funding to purchase the land, but it is looking for other options and potential revenue sources