Councilmembers Rich Zwicker, Don Persson, and I put the final touches on a new Renton Airport Leasing policy at last Thursday’s Transportation Committee Meeting. Huge credit also goes to Marcie Palmer, who chaired this committee last year when the lion’s share of the work was done. We put many, many hours of committee time into this policy, and received much input from residents and the aviation community during the past year.

The new leasing policy, which comprises about a dozen pages of text, makes some important improvements to the process of leasing airport property in the future. Some of the changes are:

(1) A clear application process for people who wish to lease airport property. Up until now, individuals have sent letters or made phone calls with proposals, but it is not always clear whether they are “applying” for lease consideration. A new application process fixes that for future applicants, and makes it clear who is “first in line” on future applications. (Unfortunately, this does not fix the confusion regarding who is first in line for current applicants. The mayor’s office, airport manager, and city attorney will be working with those individuals who believe they have an outstanding commitment from the city… they will try to resolve these situations as fairly as possible)

(2) City ownership of new airport buildings. Applicants who want a ground lease in order to build a hanger, office, or other facility, will now be directed to construct the building in coordination with the city. If they are proposing an appropriate improvement, the city will finance it, own it, and lease it back to the airport tenant. This will be better for all parties. Under the old policy, tenants have to give their buildings to the city at the end of their lease, resulting in an incentive for some to delay/forgo maintenance near the end of the lease period. In addition, the new policy will enable the city to shorten lease periods since new leaseholders will not need 30-50 years to amortize the cost of a building. The shorter lease periods will give the city more options if a tenant is not working out, or if the city wants the land or building for another aviation purpose.

(3) The new lease policy does not give priority to a jet center….instead, it encourages a wide range of aviation uses.

(4) The new lease policy REDUCES the priority placed on the airport fully paying for itself under all circumstances. The old policy made financial return, and self-sustainment a factor above all other considerations. Under our new policy, it is seen as desirable for the airport to pay for itself, but it is recognized that that there may be occasions when the city-as-a-whole would prefer to provide a small subsidy to the the airport to maintain a more peaceful aviation use (i.e. to prevent loud fly-overs.) The highest revenues is not always going to be considered the best use.

(5) The leasing policy gives clear expectations for the financial capability/stability of new applicants for airport space. This addition, strongly promoted by Councilman Don Persson, makes good financial sense and is in line with good leasing practices for other types of real estate.

There are many other improvements in this document as well. As Transportation Chair, I have the honor of presenting the new document to the full council a week from tomorrow.

More news about Boeing solving our problems at the Renton Airport! Yay! The Boeing team are local heroes once again. Good-bye jet center…we hardly knew ya, but you seemed to have troubles making friends….

READ MORE »

Boeing is interested in leasing some property back from Renton, which makes all the discussions about a Jet Center moot.

Many citizens are taking a closer look at Renton Airport Leasing policies following the debate about an Airport Jet Center earlier this year. Here is a representative email to city council, asking us to be careful about what we approve. The city’s transportation committee has decided to hold the subject leases in committee for further study.

read the email by clicking here

From Mark Hancock, Renton citizen:

Hi Marcie, Don & Randy –

Sometime back, I found a list of FAA/airport law cases, and finally relocated it tonight (it’s an eye opener):
http://home.netvista.net/hpb/cases.html

As we all know, the FAA is not easy to deal with, and usually wins. Even the City of Naples, Florida, famous for having beaten them in court, spent
$3.4 million in studies and legal fees over 5 years to justify and defend their ban on Stage 2 jets.
http://www.soundinitiative.org/documents/NaplesJetBanStudy.doc

Mayor Tanner reminded us all a few years ago that the FAA can require airport related uses, but they cannot tell us who we have to lease to. It is easier (and cheaper) to deal with things up front, than after we let businesses/users into our property and the FAA gets more involved and has more leverage.

Read the Rest of Mr. Hancock’s email, with his recommendations, by clicking here

We covered many, many items in our annual council offsite this year. Sonics Arena, Jet Center, Sam Chastain Trail, transporation planning, our annexation approach, redevelopment, Renton Business Plan, code enforcement, Highlands clean up and revitalization, finance planning, public safety, the council committee structure, open public meetings act, and more…..simply too many issues to describe all at once. I’ll touch on several of them in upcoming journal entries.

I’ll start with a short entry on the Jet Center. This topic generated more visitors to our Council off-site than any other…it was clearly a concern for our citizens and Mercer Island citizens alike. To make a long story short, the council and Administration have agreed to revise the airport business plan to remove the language that lead up to talk of a jet center. We had language about making the airport an economic engine, that was perhaps intended to refer to Boeing, but was being used to promote the concept of a jet center.

We also agreed to pursue a Memorandum of Understanding with Mercer Island, to jointly fund and manage noise studies to determine the most neighborly way to manage the airport, while still complying with FAA requirements that the airport remain an active aviation facility.

And we seemed to reach a consensus that we consider constructing city-owned, attractive hangers that we would lease to individuals on a month-to-month or annual basis, for parking private airplane. This would give us better control than making 20-year ground leases to private parties.

We were also told that FAA wishes to work with us on all-weather approach concepts, but not until the end of this year or in 2008. While a one year delay will be disappointing for some, it will provide some breathing room for the public and city leadership to work methodically and cooperatively on our future plans.

The representatives from Mercer Island and nojets.org that were present seemed relieved by the resetting of the city’s plans and approach, and I think we are back to a truely productive diologue.

Dear Madame Mayor and City Council Members,

I’d like to share a quote by Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was an American newspaper publisher in the early 1900’s.

“Obviously, a man’s judgment cannot be better than the information on which he has based it. Give him the truth and he may still go wrong when he has the chance to be right, but give him no news or present him only with distorted and incomplete data, with ignorant, sloppy or biased reporting, with propaganda and deliberate falsehoods, and you destroy his whole reasoning process.”

While this addresses more the importance of well rounded journalism, the concept of the importance of readily having available complete and unbiased data is important in any decision making process and especially applicable to decisions related to how we want to run the Renton Airport.

A plan was developed that too quickly focused on a corporate jet center, without financial forecasting, environmental studies, or understanding the impact on the high density residential areas surrounding the airport. A decision has been made to slow the process down a bit to start collecting this much needed information. But for how long?

As you enter your council retreat this week, and talk about the airport, I hope that you will begin to ask substantive questions about the process and the other options available for the airport. The quit claim deed and the grant assurances are pointed to, by our airport manager, as the reasons why we are limited in our options and the FAA is too easily noted as limiting our options. Don’t fall for this. When you actually read these documents, they are not as limiting as you are led to believe and I have found officials in the various agencies to be far more reasonable than described.

We are concerned with the airport being self-sustaining. We are concerned with filling the area being vacated by Boeing. We hear too often that there are “scary” businesses that want to lease space, so we need to build the corporate jet center to protect ourselves. But there isn’t full disclosure of who these “scary” businesses are. Fear, without knowing if it’s based on anything real, is not a sound basis for making a decision.

Boeing is a manufacturer. There are other companies that are aviation related that make products or provide services to Boeing that would welcome the opportunity to locate on this property. I had lunch recently with one such company that would be a wonderful addition to Renton, adding to the employment base while its employees participate in our community and support our local economy. There are businesses that would enhance our quality of life in Renton rather than damage our quality of life.

Renton is proud of the 2004 survey results where the community commented so positively about how greatly improved (up to 2004) this quality of life was in Renton. But for so many, the corporate jets running 24/7 with absolutely no ability to control noise levels creates hell on earth and damages our city’s quality of life.

We must make decisions regarding the airport based on sound, complete, and unbiased presentation of all options and with substantive comment by our citizens. We must dig deep to understand the assumptions to data and information presented regarding the airport and remove “the spin” that promotes one option while excluding others.

I urge each council member to keep this in mind at the retreat. Decisions regarding the Renton Airport will impact generations to come.

Thank you!

Elizabeth Stevens

Business Jet terminal, general aviation corporate aircraft center, executive pilot lounge, VIP passenger terminal, jet maintenance center….what are we talking about exactly?

The City Council’s Transportation Committee met yesterday, and it became clear to me that we still do not have a common understanding of what the controversial ‘Renton Jet Center’ actually is. Depending on who you talk to, it may be any one of the above items, or all five, or something else entirely.

I went into yesterday’s meeting thinking that the jet center was a place where corporations or well-heeled individuals would park their executive-class business jets. And I was thinking we were talking about jets with bathrooms, sleeping accommodations, and dining tables. As I said in my blog entry on January 28, I am sympathetic to public concern that such a facility could inadvertently become home to older, noisier jets such as Lear Jets–especially if the facility is privately owned.

I also heard the viewpoint that if the jet center were built right, it could attract the much-quieter very light jets (VLJs). But after some public feedback and review, this approach did not entirely make sense to me; VLJs are relatively small aircraft, not much different in dimensions than any other six seat aircraft. They could park in a multi-use general aviation hanger, and not need special operating accommodations from a dedicated jet center. In other words, someone who owns a six-seat twin turbo-prop would need a very similar facility to someone who owns a new VLJ.

When I asked my questions about this, I was told that I was mistaken about what the jet center is. But when others tried to set me straight, I found that other parties at the table (Renton Airport Manager, Airport Advisory Committee reps, Renton’s public works director, and some of my council colleagues) could not articulate a common understanding either.

In some views it is a transient pilot lounge and waiting area, where visiting pilots can park their airplanes, visit the area, and then take-off. In other views it sounds more like a VIP passenger terminal, where outbound VIP guests queue for travels far and wide. In some scenarios it caters mostly to jets, while in others it caters to all aviation uses equally.

And as an adjunct to the areas for accommodating people, there would be areas for storing or servicing aircraft –but it is not universally clear whether these are Renton-based aircraft vs. transient aircraft, or jets vs. mixed aircraft, or a combination of all these things.

After further discussion, it appears that the reason the stakeholders don’t agree on these answers is that the city was waiting to see what the private sector might propose. i.e The city would request proposals from the private sector, then let someone privately build and own the version of the “jet center, or corporate aviation center” we like best. (We would just lease them the land for thirty or forty years.)

But such an approach would be a mistake, in my view. I feel the City of Renton should develop the facilities ourselves, to our own specifications. We could sell bonds to build good quality and aesthetically appealing hangers, pilot facilities, and maintenance bays, and then pay for the bonds with monthly rental income—with no cost to taxpayers. We could size the hangers for general aviation aircraft, possibly including VLJs. We would then lease the space on an annual basis (instead of a 30-year basis), and have good control over the continuing performance of the tenants. For instance, if someone establishes a pattern of buzzing residents or demonstrating sloppy safety practices, we would evict them and take the next tenant on the waiting list.

This approach has another great advantage. When we allow the private sector to build on leased city property, we set up a future conflict and heartbreak for our children to deal with. When the lease period expires for public land under a privately owned building, taxpayer-equity laws require that the public take possession of the building. This can seem ruinously unfair to the owners of the buildings, who constructed and maintained the building for 30 years. (Clayton Scott, who we later named the airport after, actually lost ownership of his building under these circumstances).

Forced repossession after thirty years encourages the private sector to construct low-cost or temporary buildings, so they can financially tolerate abandoning them in 30 years. Unfortunately, such buildings can look like aluminum warehouses or even Kwansit huts. And in the waning years of a thirty year lease, some tenants even lose their will to keep their buildings painted—resulting in a bleak, neglected appearance so close to the heart of our downtown.

On the other hand, if the city builds the facilities, we can make sure they look nice, are built to last, and maintained properly. We can make sure we have courteous and safety-minded tenants, and we can provide space that accommodates the mix of airplanes that the Renton Community supports. This is the plan that I would favor.

___________________________________________________________________________

Important note:

The above opinion is my own, and I do not speak for the entire council. And I offer my apologies to those of you who have been working on proposals to build your own buildings on the subject airport property. I have not seen your proposals, and I don’t know who has made submittals. But I respect your willingness to invest in our community and regret the disappointment my opinion, or the fractured community reaction, may cause you. But I would not want you to invest even more in construction plans using incorrect assumptions about council or community support. I am only one of seven council members, so I don’t know how this question will resolve itself. If the City were to build a city facility, and lease space, it would seem fair to me that those of you who have submitted proposals would be at the front of the line for lease consideration. I’m not sure of the legal issues however, so I could not promise how this would work out.