MILLFIELD, OHIO — On a Tuesday morning in late March, Representative Dale Bunker stood at a podium inside the modest terminal of Millfield Regional Airport — population: two gates, one Auntie Anne's, and a Hudson News that has carried the same four titles since 2009 — and announced that he had introduced his 340th piece of federal legislation.
The bill, H.R. 4471, proposes to rename Millfield Regional Airport the Howard P. Clements Sr. Memorial Regional Airport, in honor of a retired school principal who, according to the bill's two-page preamble, "embodied the spirit of public service in Harwick County for nearly four decades and once shook hands with Governor Voinovich at a ribbon-cutting."
It is, by the congressman's own count, his 23rd airport renaming bill in thirty years. His office describes this as "a remarkable record of constituent-focused legislating." The airport's facilities manager, Dave Kowalski, describes it as "honestly, at this point, kind of impressive in a way I can't fully explain."
A Legacy Built on Brass Plaques
Bunker, 67, first arrived in Congress in 1995 on a platform of fiscal responsibility, local investment, and what he described at the time as "getting things done for the people of Ohio's 9th." He has since gotten things done, in the sense that twenty-three local figures now have their names attached, however temporarily, to a regional airport that sees approximately forty-four commercial departures per week, mostly to Cleveland.
The honorees include a former county commissioner, two state senators, a high school football coach with a career record of 34-29, a woman who donated a significant portion of her estate to the local library (the library got a plaque too, but that was a state matter), and Gerald T. Hoffmann, a retired postmaster who, in the congressman's words, "represented everything this community stands for" and who, in the words of Hoffmann's daughter, "would have been baffled by this."
Four of the twenty-three honorees are still living. At least two were reportedly unaware they had been honored until family members saw it on the local news.
The airport itself has operated under its current physical signage — "Millfield Regional Airport" in weather-worn blue lettering — since 2011, the year Kowalski quietly stopped scheduling sign updates after the third renaming in eighteen months.
"We looked into a digital sign," Kowalski said. "The quote came back at $140,000. I sent it to the congressman's office. They said they'd look into it. That was 2014."
The Philosophy of Infrastructure Identity
Bunker's office, reached by phone, was prepared for questions of this nature. A spokesperson named Tyler, who declined to give his last name but spoke with the confidence of someone who has refined this answer over many years, offered the following statement:
"Congressman Bunker believes deeply that infrastructure is more than concrete and jet bridges. It is the living story of a community. When you name a public facility after a public servant, you are inscribing that community's values into the physical landscape. The congressman has inscribed those values twenty-three times. That is twenty-three acts of community affirmation."
Tyler was asked whether any of the twenty-three names were currently visible anywhere in the airport.
A pause.
"The congressman's office has a framed copy of each bill," Tyler said. "They're in the hallway."
The Escalating Complexity of the Record
What makes Bunker's legislative archive particularly remarkable — and what has attracted the attention of at least two political science graduate students, both of whom have since switched topics — is not merely the volume of airport renaming bills but their increasing baroque elaboration over time.
His earliest bills, filed in the late 1990s, ran to a single page. By 2007, they averaged three pages, with expanded preambles citing the honoree's community contributions in granular detail. His 2015 bill renaming the airport after retired judge Patricia Solano ran to eleven pages and included a three-paragraph digression on the history of regional aviation in Ohio that congressional historians describe as "unexpectedly thorough" and "not really relevant to the renaming."
His current bill, honoring Howard P. Clements Sr., is the longest yet at fourteen pages, and includes a footnote acknowledging that the airport was previously named after twenty-two other individuals, which the bill describes as "a testament to the district's extraordinary depth of civic talent."
"He's essentially writing the airport's biography at this point," said Dr. Renata Chu, a professor of legislative studies at Ohio State who has followed Bunker's career with what she characterizes as "reluctant fascination." "Each bill is a palimpsest. It's a new name written over all the old names. There's something almost literary about it, if you squint."
She was asked whether it constituted effective governance.
"I said literary," she replied. "I didn't say effective."
The Next Frontier
For Bunker, the 340th bill is not a capstone. It is, he insists, a launching pad.
At the Tuesday press conference — attended by a reporter from the Millfield Courier-Dispatch, two of Clements' grandchildren, and a man who appeared to be waiting for a flight to Cleveland and got caught up in the crowd — the congressman announced that he had also pre-filed H.R. 4472, a bill proposing to formally rename the congressional airport renaming process itself.
The bill would designate the procedure by which Congress names or renames federal facilities the "Community Identity Affirmation and Infrastructure Legacy Act Process," or CIALAP.
"It's time we gave the renaming process the recognition it deserves," Bunker said, to applause from the two grandchildren and what Kowalski later described as "a kind of resigned nod" from himself.
The congressman's office confirmed that if H.R. 4472 passes, Bunker intends to introduce a follow-up bill naming the CIALAP process after someone. They are currently accepting nominations from Harwick County residents.
The airport sign still says "Millfield Regional Airport."
Kowalski says he finds it calming, at this point, to walk past it every morning.
"It's the one stable thing," he said.
