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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2001-06-07 Minutes• • 4 MINUTES OF THE AIRPORT BOARD MEETING • June 7, 2001 • MEMBERS PRESENT: Charles Wallace, Rick McKinney, Frank Burggraf, Dave Bowman, Otto Loewer MEMBERS ABSENT: Mike Andrews STAFF PRESENT: Dale Frederick, James Nicholson, Louise Powers OTHERS PRESENT: Tonya Posey -City Staff; Matt McGowan -Morning News; Matt Wagner -NW Ark. Times; Terry Collier -Tenant; Donald Owens- RVA/Drake Tower; Myron Brody -Citizen; Johnny Quinn - McClelland Engineers; K.R. Schossow-Wings Avionics, Inc. WALLACE: ITEM # 1: Call to order. Information session with Gary Dumas Welcomed everyone there and those joining on the broadcast on Public Television. Chairman Wallace suggested moving on to Item #2 and let the Mayor make his announcement later. COODY: ITEM #2: Minutes of the Mav 3, 2001 meeting. A motion to approve the minutes as written was made by Mr. Bowman and seconded by Mr. Sperandeo. The motion carried. Said he wanted to make a small announcement. Airport Director Alett Little has left our employment to pursue other interests. We've enjoyed her long tenure here. She was with the City about twelve years. Gary Dumas will be the Interim Airport Director until we hire an actual professional Airport Manager/Marketer. We are starting to advertise for that and I am going to defer to your judgement as to where best to advertise to get someone really good. We have a couple of applications that have come in and said he would visit with the Board about them and would like to take the Board's advise to get someone that will help Drake Field and help it reach its potential. Stated he appreciated the Board doing all this work. Said he saw the airport as an asset that could be worked in conjunction with the University and the technology park. WALLACE: Welcomed Gary Dumas and said the Board would look forward to his leadership in the interim. DUMAS: Stated he was glad to be there and maybe we can take the Airport to the next • -1- • WALLACE: level In all times of transitions you hate to see people leave, but perhaps its an opportunity to look in a different direction to see if we can't do things a little better. Said he had been in contact with the City's Personnel Office, with Don Bailey, and had passed on to him some of the criteria that has come out of this Board for the selection of the Airport Manager. Mr. Bailey plans to develop an ad that will go in a number of publications and asked Mr. McKinney to supply Mr. Bailey with the appropriate places for the advertisements to occur. Stated he would have the opportunity to see the ad early next week before it is placed in the publications and for those that would like to see the ad to let him know and he would be happy to share it. Commented that one of the very few privileges of being the Airport Chair is occasionally if you don't overdo it, you get to get on the soapbox briefly and his soapbox today is to want to say to all, including himself, that its going to be very tempting during the time we are looking for an Airport Manager to say lets grab somebody. It may be someone we know, it maybe someone that has been recommended, it will be tempting to say lets just get on with it, whoever is there lets get an Airport Manager and move on. Said he had talked with the Mayor and City personnel about the value of really searching the whole country for a quality Airport Manager, credentialed, experienced, ready to come to Fayetteville, who wants to live here, wants to be a part of the community, wants to help us develop a first rate airport. That is worth waiting for. Stated he feels confident. He had visited with Mr. Dumas, he knows what the Mayor's intentions are, and feels confident that we will be okay for a little while and we can buy that time to do a very logical, comprehensive and insightful search for an Airport Manager. Stating, he hoped that is what is done rather than to just lunge at whoever might be available. BURGGRAF: Asked if it wouldn't it be appropriate for the Board to pass a Resolution commending Alett Little's contribution to the Board. She was thrust into this thing with some difficult circumstances and said he thought she had done a pretty credible job in trying to promote the airport WALLACE: A motion for the Airport Board to pass a Resolution commending Ms. Little for her contribution to the Board in trying to promote the airport was made by Mr. Burggraf and seconded by Mr. Sperandeo. Chairman Wallace stated he would undertake the responsibility next week of composing the correspondence to Ms. Little. • • • • • WALLACE: DUMAS: WALLACE: DUMAS: NICHOLSON WALLACE: QUINN: ITEM #3: Old Business a. Update on the ATC Tower. The status is, we have been in contact with the FAA and they are in the process of preparing a revised Benefit Cost Analysis. The bottom line is the FAA wants a response from the City whether the City is interested in the cost sharing program for the continuation of the tower. Said he thought the answer to that was "yes". We have requested the FAA give an extension on the June 12th deadline to respond to some of their concerns and to provide the FAA with additional information. The FAA has verbally agreed to that and we will put together a packet of local information to get to them within the next 10 to 14 days. We will have discussions with the FAA in the future on the percentages on cost sharing of the tower cost. The FAA reviews their participation levels annually. Hopefully we will have more information at the next meeting. The consensus here is, we want if at all possible, to keep our tower for safety and public relations reasons, plus we like our tower people. Responding to Mr. Sperandeo's question, he explained the FAA uses calendar year information for their calculations and then review it annually. He acknowledged that Year 2001's numbers have increased over 2000's, but the FAA has been pretty frank about using the prior year's numbers. We can try to convince them through the FAA system or by using our delegation in Washington to try to modify the ratio benefit. b. Update on the eastside drainage project -request to the State Aeronautics for a State Grant at their June 13`h meeting. The application has been sent to the Department of Aeronautics. The grant request will be considered by the Commission at their meeting next week and he would be attending the meeting, possibly with Johnny Quinn. He asked the Board to pass a Resolution to approve the grant request. The approval is required by the City's Policies and Procedures to submit the grant through the City's Staff Review and Council approval process. A motion to approve the grant request which has been submitted to the State Aeronautics Commission was made by Mr. Burggraf and seconded by Mr. McKinney. The motion carried. Answering Mr. Sperandeo, the drawings are not the final project. In order to submit the grant application to the State Aeronautics, they want a preliminary engineering report and a preliminary cost estimate. The drawing was a visible aid. We have talked to Richard Mills, engineer at the State -3- • • WALLACE: DUMAS: WALLACE: DUMAS: WALLACE: BOWMAN: McKINNEY: BOWMAN: Aeronautics, and they know this is not exactly the system we may end up using. We will be looking at that in Detail Design. Detail Design has not been preformed yet. That all will be subject to review and approval by staff. Stated that he understood that the project has now been turned over to staff. Said he had no problem bringing it back to the Board, if there was time. Stated there had been two understandings about this project and he would like to get some clarification. One, we will do the work if the grant is available, and the other is, we're going to do the work and hope to get the grant, and then asked, which are we really doing? Asked if it was not the Board's intention to recommend that we go forward with the work, if the grant does not come through? Said what is driving his question is that he wants to be sure the tenants in those hangars are assured that it is our intention to correct the problem that we are working to get done and rather than saying well, if we can get some money, we'll do it. If we don't get the grant then we will just find a funding source. Stated his understanding of this is that it is in the hands of the staff and will come back to us only if Board action is required for further funding, otherwise if we receive the grant and the engineering is in place, we will move forward. c. Airport signage on US Interstate 540 / Dave Bowman. At this point signage is important to us at the airport as well as the businesses located here at the airport. To this point, that has not been a possibility. That has been tried a couple of times. We had a meeting three weeks ago with the Chamber of Commerce and the Transportation Sub -Committee of the Chamber and we had some support from the Chamber. It was mentioned in the meeting that Mr. McKinney was going to talk to Jeff Hawkins, with the Regional Planning Office Said he hadn't reached him, but he would. Commented he had a rough draft of a letter, but before going any further, he would need some information to make sure some routine channels might be more effective and will pursue those. Saying he will be working with Joe Shipman with the Highway Office in Fort Smith and will approach it with the standpoint of we really do need the help, rather than coming from a broadside letter from the governor saying you've got to do this. Getting the support of • the Northwest Arkansas Regional Planning Commission will help. Stated he didn't have the solution now, but he was hot on the trail, and was open to suggestions, or if anyone knows someone directly with the Highway Department that they have worked with, he was willing to make contact with them. Explaining to Mr. Dumas, this would be at Exit 61 on I-540, which is our old Cato Springs Road exit. The explanation has been that since we don't have airline service at this airport we couldn't put a sign up. The Air Museum has asked to put a sign up and because they are working within a State Historical building site, but as they are privately funded, non-profit, they were not allowed to put up a sign. It is critical for the economic development of the City to have a sign out there for the Municipal Airport. There needs to be a sign. A business coming here wants to make sure there is a tower and that people know where they are. Responding to Mr. McKinney's request that the Board carry the torch for the Air Museum, he said there have been historical precedence of other states having museums or non-profit agencies under organization and having signs put out on Interstates in Missouri and in Texas. SCHOSSOW: Stated James had been good about getting people out to give estimates on work at Wings hangar, but wanted an update and to know when the work is going to be started? NICHOLSON: Said it would be 7 to 10 days before he would have the bids in and then would schedule the work. Suggested they discuss the work outside the Board meeting and suggested they met following the Board meeting. SPERANDEO: Asked if this was the last time they were going to hear about this? Dr. Wallace had suggested that Mr. Schossow and staff get together privately to discuss it and form a plan and get it fixed. POSEY: Answering Mr. Bowman's questions on the status of the web page for the airport, stated the City has formed a development committee for the City's web site. They will be meeting in a few weeks and an Request for Proposal will be sent out in the next month. They should be ready to start on something by fall. Suggested to the Board that if there was any ideas of what they wanted on the web to call her. McKINNEY: Explained there is a web -site on Drake Field put out by Jeff Erf at wwwdrake Field.com. • • • • BOWMAN: WALLACE: FREDERICK: BRODY: POWERS: WALLACE: WALLACE: FREDERICK: Stated he would like to see something that showed some of the plans we have in mind and kept updated. Because of the massive use of the intemet, if we aren't up on it in a realistic way it's difficult to progress. Said he had visited the web site several times and it seemed a good representation of the airport. Commented you could also get to Mr. Eris site through PilotPoint.com, and had visited Mr. Erf s web site yesterday. Said several times through the past years he had looked in the phone book for the Fayetteville Airport and never could find the airport because it is titled Drake Field. Perhaps if it were changed to Fayetteville Drake Field. Fayetteville is the key word. Stated the Airport is listed under "City of Fayetteville" in the white pages and under "Airports" in the front of the book and also listed under "Airports" in the Yellow Pages. ITEM #4: New Business There is no New Business on the agenda, which is to say there is a process for New Business. If there are concerns, we should know about those by bringing them either to his attention or to staff's attention and we will incorporate them in the agenda. ITEM #5: Other Business a. Marketing Report. May was busy. The Airport's mail -out post card was completed and approximately 130 were mailed to the west coast. The larger brochure is 90% complete and will be quite colorful We have continued to advertise statewide in the "Fly Low" publication. The State Aeronautics Commission held their monthly meeting here last month and some of our Airport Board members and the Mayor were able to attend. This was the first time they had met at Drake Field. It was a good opportunity for them to see the projects they have participated in, to see the drainage problem, view future project sites, and to tour the A & P school. Superior's hangar has been taking up a lot of our time, working with the engineers and Superior to get the hangar designed as they needed. It has been advertised. We hope to get it under construction in July. • • • WALLACE: FREDERICK: WALLACE: FREDERICK: WALLACE: Airport staff E-mailed all the Air National Guard units within 600 miles of Fayetteville informing them of our MLS and to inquire if they had an interest in flying Drake Field if the MLS was up and running. Staff will be contacting Air Force Bases within 600 miles of Fayetteville. Five on-site visits were made to the Airport by persons interested land leases and renting terminal space. Stated he had visited 11 airports in Oklahoma in May. That trip resulted with three good leads. Three t -hangar units became available in May and were immediately filled. Presented the Airport Board Plaque that will be displayed in the terminal, explaining each Board member's name will be placed on the plaque when they leave the Board. Reminded everyone of AirFest this weekend. The Airport office will have a table at the A & P school. James attended a State Highway Department training session on DBE's and also a Economic Development seminar. These were both in Little Rock. An idea that has come up several times about the MLS, is that there may be some training schools that provide training for international pilots. While there isn't a high need for training in that system for US pilots, many of the European and middle eastern air operations do. That might be a lead. We did have an inquiry from some consultants that are putting together information on that, so pilots are aware of that. Asked for a list, by hangar, of the airport hangar tenants. Said it had been a while since we had put together a function on the east side for pilots and may be we can plan one together with hot dogs and cokes and let everyone visit together. Responding to Mr. Sperandeo's question, are there any plans for Hangar H? Said he thought it was in next year's Capital Improvement Program It is in the Five Year Plan and can be revisited when we do the budget for Year 2002. The projects can be moved around as the need for the project occurs. Asked if it was a reasonable goal to say that the next step is to get those three hangars filled and back to the time when we have a waiting list, a then look forward to a new t -hangar? Stated we need 200 airplanes, that would be a -7- • • • FREDERICK: BURGGRAF: DUMAS: FREDERICK: LOEWER: BURGGRAF: healthy airport, so we need to market, market, market. Said when you have 73 hangars, you get to where people are changing, people moving into town -moving out of town, changing jobs. There is going to be some movement. Responding to Mr. Collier's question of the schedule for the open t -hangars? They will have to be budgeted this year for next year. The locations have been identified. If we need to move them ahead of the normal budget process, then Mr. Dumas will have to approve that and then move forward. Answering Mr. Sperandeo, he didn't see it as an either/or situation for the sunscreens and the t -hangar. If the Board wants to see that happen before Year 2002, then they need to voice that opinion. Stated he would like to see them started before another year goes by. Everything you have been talking about are issues that will have to be addressed. We have some opportunities here and we will just have to evaluate what the needs are compared to what the budget is and what we can get accomplished. Answering Mr. Burggraf, the t -hangars could possibly be funded with assistance from the State, and was not sure about Sunscreen assistance. Thought this was a good time to bring this up. He had met with Dale and Alett and one thing they had discussed was developing an economic computer model. Nothing too sophisticated, but would look at resource allocation and income. What we have is a pool of money and over here opportunities to invest. The question is where do you get your return for the given level of resource you have available? Stated he believed it would be possible over a few months to come up with something to look at decisions like this. Is there a reason to shoot for 200, or should it be 300, or should it be 150? Where do we go with the level of subsidy, what's the best place to spend that? What it will show is all these relationships, and you will be able to see. If you don't agree that there is that cause and effect then we can go in and change it if it turns out external observations agree. Said he thought it would give us some a lot of insight of the overall use and the fmancial viability of the Airport. Said he had offered to work with Airport staff to try to develop something like that and he wasn't really organized to bring this up today. One item that would have to be factored into this, the most obvious, that if -8- LOEWER: WALLACE: LOEWER: we don't increase our number of planes we are going to lose our money paying for the tower. The payoff is more airplanes, less cost to us to subsidize the tower. • Those relationships have to be built in, and it will not come because one person sits on the outside saying this is what works. It will take a group of people saying this relationship isn't connected as it should be and you go through a process and at the end of the day we will all have a greater understanding of how certain things work together. Certain things fuel other things. What is the net result and what is the time frame? Decisions will be more quantifiable. Answering Mr. Wallace, to achieve this, he said he could work with staff to come up with something. You start with what are the income generating items, what is the resource base, where do you spend your money, then you say what those things are a function of. At the end there are three or four or five events that make a difference, so lets project that landings will go up 10% a month for the next five years. What will that do if everything else is equal? Then what we would do as a group would be to sit down and say, what if we do these things in combinations? What will happen is you will find a resource becomes very limiting. Like in this discussion here, you might find that the number of hangars becomes a severe limitation because it is connected to the number of landings. So you can take some outside factors and plug it in. There will be a list of inputs and everybody will know what the relationships are, but the relationships are sometimes indirectly connected to the picture. Its not a complicated model, saying he had made his living putting these things together. At the end of the day you will see unused resources and overused resources and we'll see this pool of reserves sitting out here either shrink or go up, depending on decisions. What do we have to do to get this started, saying he was sold on it. If you will ask me to work with staff and bless it, saying he didn't have a proposal today, and had only met Mr. Dumas today. It would take about two or three months to do it. What he would do is work with staff to come up with a first iteration, then we would have things we have impressions about and things we don't know and we would want to talk to you in a work session environment asking is this what we think these relationships are. It would become our model, not mine, not the staff's, everybody would look at it. If it works it is because all of us here have a vested interest in it and believe in what we have put together together. Said he would use a spreadsheet with an input and output model and use some graphics. We would spend, once we had a proto type for you to look at, not more than four to eight hours of your input time. It will take longer for us It will take two to three times to meet. • • • l• DUMAS: Answering Mr. Wallace, we could have some information to show the Board by September 691 and give the Board a chance to interact with the work, adding the Board would enjoy this. Answering Mr. Wallace, he had two thoughts on this, that any Board that is this involved and wanting to commit their personal time is an asset, and second, the development of this airport, or the lack thereof, is a complex problem and any thing we can do will help us define the needs. BURGGRAF: We have all kinds of plans, but none with statistical basis or relevance in terms of projections. The first plan was based on the assumption we would retain some little or none of our airline service. Then we just had a Proposed Land Use Plan completed, but it doesn't have any statistical data. This would give you something you could use when visiting with the FAA. DUMAS: Said he thought the airport was a much broader problem than just operations. This is a diamond in the rough as an industrial center for the entire community. Doing this process will give us an opportunity to pin point those areas that can make the most benefit to the airport the quickest. BOARD CONSENSUS: The Airport Board agreed a to develop a model for the airport which would benefit decision making for future projects and approved Mr.Loewer to work with staff to establish the model. BOWMAN: Stated he would try to find additional information from Emery Riddle. BURGGRAF: Offered to help, as he had done some of this type of work. Said he thought the temporary hangars (sunscreens) should be budgeted and apply for assistance from the State this year. FREDERICK: The process would be to request a Budget Adjustment through the City Council. WALLACE: FREDERICK: A motion to recommend proceeding as quickly as possible, with the construction of the first open hangar, or sunscreen hangar, was made by Mr. Burggraf and seconded by Mr. Bowman. Said he just now received information that the former Airport Manager, Alett Little, had been doing some work on that project and was working to have the sunscreens designed by City staff and at this point he didn't know the details of her work or how far the project has proceeded, but he would check on it. -10- • • • • DUMAS: WALLACE: That sounds like a structural engineer project and he didn't think the City has a structural engineer on staff. Asked if the airport could receive assistance from the State, or would it be cheaper to build enclosed hangars with assistance from the State? Said we would find out and report next month. There are functional and economic reasons along with a variety of others that sunscreen hangars might be helpful for us The consensus of the Board is that we would like to see some of those on the field. The request is that at the next meeting is to look at a plan, not whether we need them. WALLACE: The motion carried. b. Information session with Myron Brody. Stated Mr. Sperandeo had called him saying he had a person he would like to bring as a guest to the Board to talk about some of his experiences. SPERANDEO: Myron is an art instructor at the U. of A., but he brings a specialty of expertise to the meeting in the form of revenue enhancement. BRODY: Thanked the Board for the invitation and allowing him to speak. Commented on the selection of the Airport Manager, saying the person you want is already working, has a terrific life, has a terrific job, and the question is how do you lure that person here? Some of you may want to check with the centers that train Aviation Administrators as a resource, and last but not least, check with the professional, executive hiring services that are fairly neutral and has vast connections. He stated he is involved with problem solving and worked with USIA in many countries all over the world, which has to do with health, how you go from a government sponsored cultural business to a private enterprise, and nothing to do with art. Saying what you have here is adversity which can only lead to opportunity and the problem is to get beyond the past and the past was a commercial center. Its not going to be a commercial center anymore. Saying if he was an administrator for American Airlines, he wouldn't think it was profitable to have two sets of employees and operations close to each other, but maybe in fifty years it will be different. For the next ten to twenty years you've got a marketing product. As our past manger said, its not just about aviation. This is one of the cornerstones of the community, which includes education, University and research. This has to be vital part of the that research park presentation to industry, and hoped the representation by this group on the economic development side will work with that group. The one business that is not being utilized to its maximum is the FBO. What are the things that would attract a pilot to come here and fuel? This center, this FBO, has to be totally different than any other FBO. It has to be what he would call a millennium -11- • • • WALLACE: center, with millennium service, because the only thing you have to sell is service. The aircrafts are all the same, what difference if its Boeing or Airbus. It's the person that you are interacting with, how quickly that fuel is put on board, how fast that company is responding to the needs of that company. He had visited airports across the country that offer really tremendous service. The question is whether the City wants to be in the Fixed Base management operation or are we going to have a private entity do it and hope it meets our expectations. Because happiness is nothing more than reality without expectation. So is it even any interest of our Springdale operator to be concerned with our operation here, what's his big picture, how many places to I have to be this week to put meat on the table? The question is what does the City want? He urged the Airport seek out the top bases across the country, visit them, seeing what it there and aiming for the best. This is not an impossible task because you have what other communities dream about. There is an education component, how is the Fayetteville High School tied into this airport? There is a program in New Jersey which is used to motivate delinquents. Also there is the cultural component and richness that a state or town has to offer. It must be exhibited and it must be included. You could have air aviation exhibits of famous artists, government collections, military exhibitions. It's a business you are running. Have something different that makes pilots want to stop here, meals, or whatever. Thanked Mr. Brody coming to speak. He said something exciting is starting to happen. We have moved to the point where we have on the Board, and in our community resources, people that are really thinking forward. Along with getting our business done today, we have heard a plan to make some logical, analytical decisions that are informed. The idea of being the best appealed to him, an airport that is unique, progressive. BOARD CONSENSES: The next Airport Board will not meet in July and the next meeting will be on August 2nd, unless a called meeting is required. WALLACE: Meeting adjourned at 3:00 p.m. L' Frank Burggraf, Secretary Date -12- • • • P\ P)ut — 4t (eAthi ,t, )(0- LogAs•Aelar off./‘k, -13-