The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Terminal and sprucing up access are priorities
The staff of the Gunnison-Crested Butte Regional Airport is starting the process of developing a master plan that will lay the groundwork for the federal funding of projects and upgrades at the airport for the next decade or more.
At a meeting Tuesday, September 2, the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners approved a measure to bring on Denver-based consultant Jviation to take the county through the process, which can take up to 15 months.
Airport manager Rick Lamport says the master plan is a critical part of the airport’s funding, providing a guarantee of $1 million for projects annually and more in discretionary money when the need for larger projects arises.
The Gunnison-Crested Butte Regional Airport is among a group of non-hub regional airports that fits in to the national network of airports the Federal Aviation Administration and the U.S. Department of Transportation has an interest in maintaining. So through airline taxes and fees, billions of dollars ($2.9 billion in FY 2014) are collected and distributed as part of the Airport Improvement Program.
“You’ve got to have a master plan that identifies projects at the various airports where this money will be spent. So you do an airport master plan once every 10 to 15 years. At the end of the master plan, projects are then identified and approved by the FAA,” Lamport says. “You have to apply for funding every year only for those projects that are identified in the Airport Master Plan.”
Looking ahead, Lamport hopes to see improvements to the airport’s terminal and parking areas and also to the routes that visitors take from the airport into the greater Gunnison Valley, considering the airport’s location in an industrial part of town.
“The terminal is old so we certainly want to look at the capacity of the terminal to cope with the forecast, whatever that may bring,” Lamport says. “We want to look at overall traffic flows through the city to the airport, the airport being a major economic driver of the region. We want to look at how do we get to the airport, how do we make it look nice because it’s the first thing visiting passengers see.”
Lamport says they will also look at the general trends in aviation, noting possible growth in private aviation or corporate aviation and what that might require.
But the details of the plan will get hashed out throughout 2015 with help from Jviation and its subcontractors that will look at the current condition of the airport, acquire satellite images of the airport property and airspace, calculate growth and demand projections, and then produce a plan for the federal agencies to consider.
Bringing passengers through the airport is important to the process, Lamport says, because as airports compete for discretionary funds for projects, the FAA looks at the number of people who might benefit from the proposed improvements and allocate money accordingly.
At its peak, Lamport says, the airport would accommodate more than 60,000 passengers a year, but these days there are about half that many people flying into the county.
All the stakeholders in the master planning process, including many that have a hand in bringing those people through the airport, will have an opportunity to sit down together for the first time to discuss the plan on September 23.
