As Boulder residents debate whether to decommission their decades-old airport and build housing on the land, city officials have proposed a development plan to attract more air traffic and private investment to the facility.
As part of this proposal presented to the Boulder City Council on July 25, city officials suggested leasing city land to private developers to build new hangars and other facilities. This strategy aims to generate city revenue and potentially increase air traffic, thereby boosting fuel sales, which are taxed by the city.
City officials argue that increasing airport revenue is necessary to cover maintenance and operating costs — especially as the city considers rejecting federal funding ahead of a potential closure.
Residents have gathered enough signatures to place a measure on November’s ballot to close the airport. But even if it passes, the airport may have to remain operational for years. The Federal Aviation Administration requires airports to stay open for at least 20 years after accepting certain federal funds. Since the city last accepted a grant in 2020, the earliest closure date would likely be 2040, according to the city. The city would likely have to cover more costs on its own until then.
The Boulder Municipal Airport, which began as a dirt strip in 1928, primarily serves private pilots, trainees, glider pilots and scientific researchers. Twin ballot measures expected this November would decommission the airport “as soon as reasonably feasible” and repurpose the land for affordable housing. Critics of the airport also cite concerns about noise and lead pollution from piston-engine aircraft as reasons to shut it. However, proponents of keeping the airport view it as a valuable community asset and warn closure could spark a costly legal battle with the FAA, which generally seeks to keep airports open.
Before the ballot measures existed, the city began gathering community feedback to inform a new long-term plan for the airport, last updated in 2007. Residents provided input on various scenarios for the airport’s future: leaving it as is, upgrading certain facilities, turning it into a community center with amenities or demolishing it.
The city has spent more than $400,000 on airport consulting and is now recommending two possible visions for the airport to the Boulder City Council. Both scenarios involve an expansion. One scenario would keep it open indefinitely, relying on private investments for the capital improvements and maintenance. The other would close the airport, but not before offering 30- to 40-year leases to spur development and generate revenue in the short term.
Both scenarios have faced pushback from residents on both sides of the debate.
Proponents of closing the airport argue that long-term leases will constrain the city if and when the time for closure arrives, likely requiring repayment to developers for unamortized investments. The Airport Neighborhood Campaign, the group behind the closure ballot measure, said in a statement that the city “should not be offering financial incentives for private investors to build new buildings on city land at the airport site, only to have to pay out these investors and tear down those buildings.”
Those in favor of the airport’s continued operation oppose the city’s development plan, primarily due to its scale. The suggested construction of box hangars, capable of housing multiple large aircraft, is seen by some pilots as an attempt to attract private and corporate jets. “That’s not what anyone wants,” Jan Burton, a former city councilmember and member of the Boulder Airport Association, told Boulder Reporting Lab. “It’s a community airport. Everybody wants it to stay that way.”
Meanwhile, the Soaring Society of Boulder, a club that provides gliders, tows and training at the airport, has argued that both scenarios are worse than the current situation. “In sum, Boulder residents would be confronted with orders of magnitude greater noise and environmental impacts compared to the airport in its current form,” Clemens Ceipek, president of the Soaring Society of Boulder, wrote in a letter to city council.
John Kinney, the city’s airport manager, told Boulder Reporting Lab in an email that the city is not seeking to attract jets to the airport. He noted, however, that the FAA does not allow the airport to “restrict access to the market for a particular user group.”
He said the airport logs approximately 65,000 operations annually. That’s less than a third of the traffic of Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Jefferson County.
City council has so far declined to take a stance on the issue. City officials requested that councilmembers decide on a future scenario for the airport at council’s meeting on July 25, but they refrained due to the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming ballot measures and other open questions.
“The discussion continues,” Mayor Aaron Brockett said during the meeting. “We’ll stay in suspense for a while longer.”
Another unresolved issue is whether the FAA will allow the city to close the airport without a legal fight.
Contracts between the FAA and the city for land purchases in 1959 and 1977 suggested the city’s obligations to the FAA to keep the airport operating would not exceed 20 years. However, John Bauer, manager of the FAA’s Denver Airports District Office, told city officials in a March 2024 letter that “grant assurances associated with land purchased with Federal aid do not expire and the land must be used in perpetuity for its originally intended purpose.”
The city has not yet made a formal legal determination about its obligations to the FAA related to land purchases with federal funds, according to Aisha Ozaslan, a spokeswoman for the city.
Update: Based on statements from city officials, a previous version of this story stated the city last accepted a federal grant for airport maintenance in 2021, and that the city estimated the earliest it could legally close the airport was 2041. The city has since said the last grant it accepted with a 20-year assurance was in 2020, meaning that 2040 is potentially the earliest closure date for the airport.
Why did city staff expect city council to make a decision on this yesterday when they have not yet done the work to make a “formal legal determination about its obligations to the FAA related to land purchases with federal funds”? Shouldn’t that be the first step? None of this seems to be proceeding in the right order. The city has already spent $400k to come up with two scenarios that may be moot. Both scenarios involve expansion? It sounds like the feds never provided enough grant money to cover maintenance costs all along since it’s in such disrepair now. What did the airport do with the 2021 grant money? How much is needed?
I second Roxanne.
The neighborhood fighting the noise doesn’t seem to be aware that with no airport here, we are are going to have to allow DIA and Rocky Mountain air traffic to fly right over Boulder as there would be no protected airspace since Boulder is a small airport with no control tower. The maps will be changed and the new noise would bother everyone. Also by the time 40 years pass, all little planes will be electric and quiet. We have too much housing for our infrastructure already.
Spot on Barbara!