Airport’s future at stake
SANDPOINT – Windsock stretches on his perch, waking from a nap to accept a few strokes and chin scratches. He briefly bats at a catnip toy then settles back down for more snoozing.
The young kitty replaces two recently lost Sandpoint Airport cats – Wingnut who died earlier this winter and Amelia Earhart who, fitting her name, went missing.
The Sandpoint Airport is the kind of low-key place where cats wander in and out of visitors’ legs and pilots gather in the morning for coffee, doughnuts and talk about planes.
But while Sandpoint Airport boosters don’t want the airport to lose its down-home charm, they’d like to move it into the future by investing in infrastructure that could boost its image and spur regional economic development.
“We want to maintain the ambience of a small airport, but we want to grow as well,” said Sandpoint Airport Board Chairman Terry McConnaughey.
The airport holds great promise for economic growth. Already nearby development is flourishing.
Quest Aviation now employs 200 workers at its factory on the airport’s west side. The company plans to build 16 of its Kodiak planes this year, producing two planes a month by the end of the year. The ultimate goal is to build one plane every 2 1/2 days, said Paul Schaller, Quest president and CEO.
Soon a field of 44 hangars topped with loft apartments will flank the airport. The $28 million state-of-the-art SilverWing project is designed for the flier visiting Sandpoint on business or to take in the ski slopes at Schweitzer or recreation on Lake Pend Oreille.
But because both developments are located in the city of Sandpoint, the Bonner County-run airport is unlikely to see much tax benefit despite its role in attracting the business.
And future development could be hampered by neglect of the airport itself. With an operations budget of just $73,000 per year and limited money for capital improvements, Sandpoint Airport has been decaying, and supporters warn it could become obsolete if it is not improved soon.
“If you think of it as a box of Band-Aids, if you open the box today, we’re down to the last Band-Aid,” said Sol Pusey, airport board vice-chairman and a former pilot with the Flying Tigers and FedEx.
Community leaders are looking for ways to fix the problems, said Bonner County Economic Development Corp. Executive Director Karl Dye. Drafting a plan for its future is a first step. That plan would catalog all of the current needs.
Built over a weekend in 1966 by a church group using donated materials, the terminal needs to be replaced. Runways need to be resurfaced and a taxiway on the west side of the airport needs to be finished.
A new terminal could cost $1.5 million, McConnaughey said.
The airport will never grow big enough to handle large jet traffic because there isn’t room to expand the runway to handle planes the size of 737s, but it will see a growing number of small jets as business and population growth in Sandpoint continues.
And it could support commuter flights with 20-passenger aircraft.
The airport was briefly home to regular commercial flights, but McCall Air pulled out of the market in 2004 after just four months of service and hasn’t been replaced. The demand the airline needed to make Sandpoint pencil out didn’t materialize.
That means most Sandpoint residents drive to Spokane to catch flights.
Dye said the lack of commercial flights has also led to the impression the Sandpoint Airport only matters to those who own their own planes or can charter executive flights.
“We hear all the time that it’s a rich man’s playground,” Dye said.
But the economic development taking place on its edges benefits all of Bonner County, he said.
Quest Customer Service Director Steve Zaat said the airport now ranks fifth in Idaho in the number of jobs it generates. He predicted that by 2012 it could be second to only Boise’s airport in numbers of employees tied to it.
McConnaughey warned that Sandpoint could lose Quest if the company outgrows the airport. Airport improvements are essential, he said, noting that similar small-plane manufacturer, Cirrus, left a small Wisconsin city when the airport there stopped meeting its needs.
“We don’t want to see what happened with Cirrus happen in Bonner County,” he said.
One complication for the airport is that while it’s owned by Bonner County, the airport itself and much of the new development springing up around it are within Sandpoint’s city limits.
Sandpoint Airport has struggled to meet some of Sandpoint’s building codes. New hangar development on the airport’s south end has been stalled because of requirements for bathrooms every 50 yards at public facilities.
McConnaughey said the airport is seeking a variance because the public doesn’t venture into the hangar area and the bathrooms are unnecessary.
Being within Sandpoint also means any increased tax revenue generated by airport-related businesses, such as the anticipated $650,000 in taxes from development at SilverWing, goes to Sandpoint, not Bonner County, Dye said.
As it is, Bonner County spends only about $20,000 a year on the airport, with the remainder of airport’s budget coming from land leases for hangars, Pusey said.
That lease revenue could be expanded if the airport was provided the financing to build its own hangars, which would bring in higher payments, Pusey said. That money could be reinvested in the airport.
As the airport improves, more business will come, McConnaughey said.
“I like to look at the airport like the movie ‘Field of Dreams,’ ” he said. “Like the movie said, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ “