Airport busy enough for federal funding

Some people opposed to a realignment and expansion of Kalispell City Airport are questioning if city officials improperly — or even fraudulently — inflated the airport’s estimated flight operations to get it listed on the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems and make it eligible for federal funding.

The formal answer from the city is no.

And if anyone suspects wrongdoing or fraud, they should report it to the proper authorities, Kalispell City Attorney Charlie Harball said.

That hasn’t happened.

But some people point to annual operations estimates that they say grew from 12,000 to 33,000 and then 41,300 as the city applied and then got its airport listed on the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems.

Stelling Engineers installed an acoustic counter at the airport for one year and reported approximately 13,270 operations as part of the latest master plan update, a level of activity far below what was estimated in the past.

Chad Graham, an unchallenged candidate for the Kalispell City Council, raised the issue of widely varying operations estimates during an airport forum sponsored by the Kalispell Chamber of Commerce.

“Are we just talking about bad math? Was a number transposed or is something else going on? Was this fraudulent? How did this number get arrived at? They can’t both be right,” Graham said about the past estimates and the actual count.

Other people have raised the same questions.

It’s rare for a small airport such as Kalispell City Airport to have an actual operations count.

Estimating annual flight operations at non-towered general aviation airports such as Kalispell City Airport is an imprecise exercise subject to a range of multipliers and it’s “very common to have disparity” between operations estimates and the number of operations detected if an actual count is done, said Gary Gates, an airport planner with the Federal Aviation Administration’s Airports District Office in Helena.

Furthermore, the estimated number of annual aircraft operations is not the basis for getting a small general aviation airport listed on the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems.

More important is the number of based aircraft at an airport, Gates said.

The FAA has considered Kalispell City Airport’s proximity to Glacier Park International Airport. That proximity would certainly be a big factor if Kalispell was asking for federal funding to build a new airport.

“The big issue we’ve always wrestled with at Kalispell City Airport is we have the activity there today,” Gates said. “We’re not building it, it’s already there. So that’s been a pretty significant consideration when we looked at if we could support improving it to get it to meet the design standards, provided the city and community support doing it. That’s been the battle and what we’re waiting to see. We can’t like an airport any more than the community does.”

Even with the lower-than-estimated level of aircraft operations Stelling Engineers reported at Kalispell City Airport, it remains one of the busiest general aviation airports in Montana. That’s based on both the number of based aircraft and annual flight operations.

The airport is the subject of a ballot issue facing Kalispell voters in the Nov. 5 election.

Referendum 103 asks Kalispell residents to vote for or against the repeal of a resolution the Kalispell City Council passed 5-4 in July 2012.

The City Council passed the resolution to accept an airport master plan update prepared by Stelling Engineers and approve a plan to develop the airport to B-II design standards in collaboration with the Federal Aviation Administration and the federal Airport Improvement Program.

If the referendum fails, the City Council’s decision stands and work on that project can proceed.

If the referendum succeeds, voters will repeal the resolution and put an end to an airport project that has been in the works for nearly a decade. That would throw the question of future investment in the city’s general aviation airport back into the lap of the City Council with one less option to consider.

Reporter Tom Lotshaw may be reached at 758-4483 or by email at tlotshaw@dailyinterlake.com.