Photo by Ryan Howard
A plane takes off from the Daniel A. Deponti Airport’s grass runway in Forest Lake. The city’s Airport Commission is requesting a city funding commitment to obtain a grant from MnDOT to pave the runway.
Supporters of Forest Lake’s Daniel A. Deponti Airport are hoping that the second time is the charm when it comes to getting a paved runway.
According to airport commissioner Rick Ashbach, the city is in prime position to get a grant next year from the Minnesota Department of Transportation to improve the airport’s 2,700-foot landing surface, which is currently a flat strip of grass, and to create a new taxiway for landed planes. To get the potential $2.7 million in funding, however, the city needs to show its commitment to helping fund the project.
Ashbach said that a paved runway at the airport has been planned for a long time. The airport and much of the surrounding property was bought by Forest Lake Township at cheap, farmland-level prices in 1998 from Tom and Kay Doherty, longtime owners and flying advocates in the city. The couple, now deceased, wanted the airport to continue operating and the surrounding land to be used for community assets. When the township bought the property, it conducted a feasibility study to determine the airport’s viability and the level of service it could support while remaining viable. Improving the runway from grass to asphalt was deemed a valuable step in improving the airport to its full potential.
“All of the capital improvement projects we have scheduled come from the feasibility study,” said Ashbach.
When the township was annexed by the city of Forest Lake, the airport came with it. Ashbach said airport supporters are proud to say that the airport has largely been self-sustaining. Its operating costs are paid for by airplane fuel sales, hangar leases and on-site land and building rentals (for example, the Forestland Nurseries site is rented on airport property), while capital improvement projects have been funded by grants and the sale of parts of the more than 500 acres the Dohertys sold to the township. Other once-empty parts of the property have been converted into Fenway Fields or donated to create the Hardwood Creek Library site, fulfilling the community asset part of the Dohertys’ hope for the land.
Photo by Ryan Howard
Traffic to the airport by area residents who want to sky dive with Twin Cities Skydive is one way the airport brings people into the community.
Though the airport has avoided a major impact on Forest Lake’s general fund budget in the past, Ashbach appeared at the City Council’s August budget talks to request a funding commitment of $300,000 to help pave the runway. The MnDOT grant requires a city match, and Ashbach told council members the state department needs to know that Forest Lake is serious about getting the work done.
“If we don’t have a commitment to proceed, there’s no reason they should spend their energy on us,” he said during the Aug. 20 budget meeting.
Ashbach is used to listing the assets the airport brings to the community, but he said it all boils down to the airport being another hub people can use to enter and access the city. People drive to town to take to the air with Skydive Twin Cities, small plane pilots land in the city for business trips in the metro, and pilots from outside of town keep their planes in the local hangars. Those people, Ashbach argued, use city services and frequent city businesses. To the city’s Airport Commission, the airport is a component of the town’s transportation network, no different than a bridge or a bike trail.
“If you don’t (make) improvements to a bridge or improvements to an airport, you won’t have as many people coming to your city,” Ashbach said.
What’s certain is that the airport’s grass runway is keeping some planes away. Several insurance companies won’t allow planes they insure to land on grass runways, and Ashbach said current aeronautic technology is slowly but surely leaving landing areas like Forest Lake’s behind.
“The airplanes of today that are more fuel efficient and faster are not designed to land on grass,” he said.
The airport was in the process of getting a MnDOT Aeronautics grant for a paved runway when the economic recession hit in the late 2000s. The money MnDOT uses for the grants (raised from taxes on airplane fuel, airplane sales and similar revenue sources) was reallocated, halting plans for the project. A number of pilots who had put down lease deposits for hangar space in Forest Lake pulled out, taking their revenue with them.
However, MnDOT now has funds available again, as well as funds previously pulled from the department during the downturn. While a project like the runway paving and taxiway creation might normally qualify for a 80-20 percent MnDOT match, said Ashbach, the department is currently able to offer 90-10 percent matches, requiring the city to fund only $300,000 of a $3 million project.
In a budget year with rising city center costs and other potential expenditures on the horizon, however, the City Council was cautious on additional bonding commitments. Mayor Chris Johnson asked the commission to explore more ways to monetize the airport and wondered why MnDOT would feel a need for a hard surface runway in the city when nearby airports like Anoka and Osceola already have paved landing areas.
“I’m still on the fence,” he said.
However, Councilwoman Susan Young (who is also on the Airport Commission) said a paved runway in Forest Lake would help fill a gap in the state’s airport system in the northeastern quadrant of the metro area. She suggested that the council put $150,000 toward the project on the city’s 2015 capital improvement plan and $150,000 more in the 2016 plan. That way, she said, the city can show that it wants to work with MnDOT without levying residents to help support a grant that might not be awarded to the city.
“It indicates that it’s in our plan; it’s something the council wants to move forward with,” City Administrator Aaron Parrish said of what the move would mean.
The capital improvement plan will be discussed along with the city’s preliminary budget at a council meeting this month (likely Sept. 8, but city staff did not have a finalized agenda at press time).
If MnDOT does award the grant to Forest Lake, the earliest funds could be allotted is in summer of 2015, when the department’s next fiscal year begins.
The feasibility study calls for additional improvements as the years go on, including a slightly expanded runway and taxiway. While those may be valuable additions to the airport’s future, said Ashbach, the paved runway could start adding interest and traffic as soon as it’s installed, particularly as some pilots are transitioning away from the more regulated Metropolitan Airports Commission sites.
“(Pilots) are driving past Forest Lake to go to Rush City and to go to Osceola,” he said.