Lovins: Some airport advisors still mislead Commissioners and residents

Brad Jacobsen, an outside consultant to Pitkin County, claims that the runway shift is the only divergence from the Common Ground Recommendations. In fact, the new plan also flunks the community’s specific goals for airliners’ noise, pollution, emissions, capacity, weight, and passenger growth. Jacobsen and Airport Director Dan Bartholomew couldn’t explain where the fake compliance claims for the first three goals came from. Putting a green checkmark on a slide doesn’t make it so.

Your page-one story (April 11) says the FAA is “demanding” that the airport eliminate its Modification of Standard (MoS) — its 1999 consent to the current airfield layout and wingspan limit. Not so. Exactly a year earlier, the FAA’s John Bauer told the BOCC that we can keep our MoS (which he said the FAA won’t revoke), along with our 95-foot wingspan limit and airfield layout, if we forego discretionary grants and stop asking for bigger planes — meaning private planes, since the airlines aren’t asking. (Who is? The County, in its forecast for the FAA. Two pilots with firsthand knowledge say this push came from local Gulfstream 650 owners: Aspen Daily News, Mar. 31 and Apr. 9.) Jacobsen insists the FAA would never approve a plan without bigger planes. Please compare his opinion with John Bauer’s videos making exactly that offer, twice, as FAA policy, and confirming it’s a choice the County can make: aspenflyright.org/videoguide.

Our 7-step plan shows a practical path to accept the FAA’s offer to keep our rules and lose the discretionary grants, which are worth little or nothing net of the costs they would require of us (aspenflyright.org/BOCCstrategy). The essential new runway and terminal can be amply financed just from promised new guaranteed-minimum revenues from private planes — even if the County takes no larger role or share, but simply accepts Atlantic Aviation’s contract renewal.

Of course, rebuilding the runway anywhere needs a new Airport Layout Plan. The FAA could choose to dishonor its offer and take responsibility for the consequences — but only by rejecting its own core mission of ensuring a safe and efficient airport. Accepting its offer, submitting a status-quo layout plan, and saying the County will rebuild the runway at its own expense as soon as allowed to should change the dynamic and start to rebuild trust between the FAA, airport, County government, and community.

You report that “Even the Common Ground recommendations acknowledged the need” for bigger planes and a new airfield. But that’s only because the County’s advisors instructed participants that current airliners were about to retire and no replacements were available, so only bigger planes could sustain commercial service. All those premises proved to be false — the current CRJ700s will fly for decades (says the County’s lead forecaster in our video), and if replaced at ASE, the E175 jet officially adopted also fits our airfield today — but strangely, the policy continues on autopilot. The County even has the gall to name its policy for the chief community goals it comprehensively violates — all except the deceitfully procured shift to bigger planes.

Only Commissioner Kury is asking the right questions and insisting on a proper financial analysis. Ours, submitted three weeks ago, received no identification of errors, but only objections to claims we didn’t make and to explicit omissions that don’t affect our conclusions. The County is hiding behind negotiation secrecy, but we used only the County’s published data to show that discretionary FAA grants aren’t needed or worthwhile. Arithmetic is not an opinion.

The latest misinformation, from Evan Marks (April 12), conjures new fantasies: a closed or federalized airport, a “misguided referendum calling for ASE’s self-management,” sketchy amateur operators, and a panicked exit by spooked airlines. None of this is true. Neither were his criticisms of our financial analysis. Had he read it, he’d know that the new FBO revenues aren’t just “indispensable to financing” the new terminal but can entirely finance it and the new runway and more, without the FAA grants for which he wants to mortgage our community’s quality of life. And those FBO revenues come from private operators who run 83% of the flights but (Evan estimates) carry 1% of ASE passengers. Private operators, not airlines, want bigger planes, and account for most of the fuel purchases, runway wear, and noise complaints, so that seems fair.

And before decrying delays in airport decisions, ask who caused them. The County alone designed and ran that process and maintained the decrepit runway and terminal. Citizen groups that didn’t then exist now seek smart, prompt, honest, open decisions. Don’t blame those new solution-finders for a dozen-plus years of deficient airport governance. Our airport needs what many others have: an independent, expert, transparent, and accountable Board of Directors to take this unconscionably complex load off our Commissioners.

It’s time to let the sunshine in and dispel distractions. As Shakespeare wrote, “The truth will out.”

Amory B. Lovins is president of Aspen Fly Right, an independent, noncommercial, non-profit, nonpartisan public charity with public-benefit, scientific, and educational purposes.