Lovins: We can choose the airport we want — it’s already paid for
Guest Commentary
Austin Colbert/The Aspen Times
Our airport doesn’t need the FAA’s discretionary grants, and it’s cheaper not to accept them.
Those grants cost too much because they’d be given only to build a new airfield to accept more, bigger, mainly private planes. On current plans, that expansion would add more costs than it would add grant dollars. The bigger airfield with grants would cost the county more than a better airfield without grants. That better airfield would perfectly fit the planes we have, install a brand-new runway, and serve a modern doubled-size terminal.
If the FBO remains Atlantic Aviation’s private monopoly, the $19 million in new payments Atlantic Aviation’s offered every year for the next 30 years could finance all the airport improvements we need, whether bigger with grants or just better without grants. Or if the county kept local control of the FBO, then not needing to reward private shareholders could leave even more money for the airport, plus many societal benefits.
How do we know all this? Because a new independent analysis by Aspen Fly Right, asking different questions, has just combined published county cost estimates with expert financial guidance to produce the startling findings summarized in the attached graph and documented at aspenflyright.org/airportfinance.
Our County Commissioners were asked on March 12 to change design and move the runway rather than the taxiway. That change buys more time to seek expiring grants for a bigger airport and may cut its cost from about $0.7 billion (three times the cost of a merely better airport) to perhaps around $0.5 billion.
But how to design a bigger airport is still asking the wrong question.
A smarter solution would move neither the runway nor the taxiway but sustain both right where they are. Their present size and location fit both current and replacement commercial regional jets that ensure thriving commercial service. The airlines now fly the planes they want and aren’t asking for bigger ones.
That status-quo airfield could serve future needs consistent with past history — rather than the tripled growth in the botched FAA-dictated forecast, carrying by 2050 two-thirds more airline passengers than we can’t manage now.
As the FAA’s regional manager twice told the BOCC last April, the county can keep the present airport layout and 95-foot wingspan limit if it stops asking for bigger planes. It would then lose new FAA grants but doesn’t need them: the FBO’s offered new revenue can finance all the infrastructure we need, funding a better airport twice over.
We can thank the FAA for continuing to keep us safe and politely decline its services as Aspen’s Developer-in-Chief.
This would make everyone happier – except perhaps owners of private jets too big to fly into Aspen but who are too bashful to say so.
We would regain independence from a safety-skilled federal agency that cares only about aviation, imposing its one-size-fits-all growth ambitions on our valley with no regard to its conditions, needs, or wishes. Preserving our half-century of thoughtful growth management would be a giant step toward protecting our home, our community’s character and values, and our quality of life.
We just need our County Commissioners to understand the financial arithmetic that now makes this practical – or to hear our voices at the ballot box in November.
Amory B. Lovins is president of Aspen Fly Right, an independent, noncommercial, non-profit, nonpartisan public charity with public-benefit, scientific, and educational purposes.
