Editor’s note: This is the second of three stories relating to interviews with candidates for seats on the new Airport Advisory Board. The last installment will appear in Monday’s Aspen Daily News.
Pitkin County commissioners on Friday completed the process of interviewing candidates for the new Airport Advisory Board.
Following the interview process, the elected officials said they needed more time to consider their decisions. Fifteen people, culled from a total application pool of 75, were interviewed on Wednesday and Friday.
Commissioners are tasked with choosing seven voting members and two nonvoting alternates. The board also will include three ex-officio members from the municipalities of Aspen, Snowmass Village and Basalt.
Commissioners said their plan is to submit seven names representing their preferred choices to Deputy County Manager Rich Englehart by Tuesday night. Englehart will tally the names provided by each commissioner to determine if there is a consensus. The board will meet in the coming weeks to discuss the matter further and finalize their choices. No date was set for the meeting as of Friday, but commissioners said they wanted to seat the board before the end of the year.
Creation of the board follows the lengthy ASE Vision community process the county kicked off in late 2018 to study Aspen-Pitkin County Airport redevelopment concepts. ASE is the Federal Aviation Administration’s three-letter identifier for the airport.
That process resulted in a list of recommendations that one of the ASE Vision committees approved in March 2020. The recommendations include reconstruction of the terminal building to make it more passenger and employee friendly; a controversial runway widening that would allow larger commercial and private planes to use the airport; and other initiatives, including the goal of making the airport more environmentally friendly in terms of noise and emissions.
The new advisory board will be tasked with looking at big- and small-picture airport issues, primarily pertaining to the facility’s proposed redevelopment. Members will not be involved in day-to-day airport operations, officials have said.
Friday’s Aspen Daily News story reported interview details relating to six of the 15 candidates. Today’s story will focus on another three, while the final story in Monday’s newspaper will provide an overview of the remaining six.
Bruce Gordon: The founder, president and chief pilot for the nonprofit group Ecoflight interviewed on Wednesday. Aside from the safety issue, he said his big concern was the effect an airport expansion would have on community growth.
The general aviation business at the airport has increased dramatically over the last few years, especially since the onset of COVID-19, with more people flying private jets to Aspen, Gordon said.
“I’ve never seen it so crowded,” he said, referring to airspace and aircraft parking. “Airspace is limited.”
Responding to a question, Gordon suggested he doesn’t think that private-plane operators would go along with voluntary changes aimed at reducing traffic at the airport or enduring their aircraft falls in line with community values.
“I think they’re going to do what they want to do, when they want to do it,” he said.
Gordon, who flies throughout the West on environmental missions, said he served on the ASE Vision Technical Committee. He said he disagreed with the committee’s majority, which came to a conclusion that allowing bigger planes wouldn’t necessarily translate into greater community growth.
Andrew Doremus: The professional pilot and real estate broker interviewed with the board on Wednesday as well. He noted that great care will have to be taken with redeveloping the airport, both on the airside and the terminal side, because of its small footprint.
“We have to be careful with how it’s done and do it in a way nobody’s done it before,” he said. In particular, the terminal building redevelopment will require “out-of-the-box thinking,” Doremus said.
Like others who interviewed for a spot on the board, he said his top priority for airport redevelopment relates to safety.
“We have a stigma throughout the aviation community that it’s one of the most dangerous airports in the country,” Doremus said. “It really is not unsafe but there is this opinion.”
He said widening the runway to 150 feet, a controversial recommendation that evolved from the ASE Vision process, will make the airport safer. A wider runway would allow larger commercial and private jets to use the Aspen airport.
Commercial pilots must undergo training to fly into and out of the local airfield, but general aviation’s private pilots do not. Doremus said while private aircraft pilots can’t be forced to undergo training, the county can work through the insurance industry to ensure that training is conducted on the general aviation side of the spectrum.
Doremus added that he was in favor of moving the runway alignment 50 feet to the west, which was the original plan and the focus of an environmental assessment a few years ago. During the ASE Vision process, the overarching committee decided, at the behest of some members, that the alignment should stay the same for safety reasons: chiefly, so that pilots would not come into close contact with Shale Bluffs.
Doremus said the Federal Aviation Administration and the ASE Vision Technical Committee determined that Shale Bluffs would not be a concern if the runway were shifted to the west. Changing the alignment would create more room on the east side for terminal development and other improvements, he added.
Valerie Braun: The longtime Woody Creek resident and secretary of the Woody Creek Caucus said she has been involved with airport issues for decades. She recently moved to the Frying Pan Valley and is currently building a house in Carbondale.
Interviewing on Friday, she said she doesn’t hear as much aircraft noise in the Frying Pan area as she did in Woody Creek, but it’s still recognizable.
“You’d be surprised how much aircraft noise there is [throughout the valley], all the way down to Carbondale,” Braun said.
Braun served on one of the five ASE Vision committees. In fact, she presented a minority opinion to the Pitkin Board of County Commissioners when it reviewed the ASE Vision process’ findings in 2020.
While she has not changed her opinion about the need for a runway widening, she said she still feels that the airport’s terminal and layout are due for some type of overhaul.
The belief that the runway needs to be expanded to accommodate a new generation of aircraft needs further study, Braun said.
“Things are changing constantly,” she said. “We need to be more flexible and open with regard to certain aspects of [the ASE recommendations],” she added.
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November 13, 2021 at 05:00PM
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PitCo commissioners complete airport board interviews - Aspen Daily News
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