Airport commission urges approval of increased runway-widening cost

LOVELAND — Northern Colorado Regional Airport’s governing commission has recommended that the Loveland City Council approve a change order that would increase the cost of widening the airport’s main runway, although some panelists expressed concerns about whether the project is needed and about what effect a temporary closure of the airport would have on local businesses.

The commission’s unanimous vote Thursday only came after Commissioner Troy Krenning, who is also a Loveland City Council member, questioned the need for the widening and was assured that there was an “absolute guarantee” that 90% of the extra $75,615.64 the change order would cost would be eligible for federal grant reimbursement.

The original contract with Denver-based Dibble Engineering for the widening of Runway 15-33, as part of the airport’s quest to improve safety and lure commercial airline service back to the airport, was for $51,686, but was amended to $763,460 last July when design and bid services were added. In October, a change to the Federal Aviation Administration’s design process resulted in the airport staff’s recommendation that a second amendment be added to increase the cost again.

According to the summary provided by Francis Robbins, the airport’s operations and maintenance manager, the FAA found in February “that certain taxiway geometry and lighting standards needed to be included in the scope of construction and thus needed to be added to the scope of design. The changes include designing taxiway connector pavements to meet geometry standards by pavement reductions or additions, adjusting the runway and taxiway edge lights back to standard geometry for the adjusted pavement, and adjusting the blast pad to standard dimensions for the new runway width.”
The blast pad reduces erosion from exhaust when jets take off.

“This impact to the design process is relatively minor compared to the scope of the project,” Robbins wrote, “and leveraging the economies of scale during this large construction project make it smart business to accomplish these during a single project to reduce costs and runway downtime.”

That downtime raised the eyebrows of members of the commission.

“This runway widening project is the thing that’s going to shut down our runway for months,” said Commissioner Mick Williams. “As a commission, are we telling all the users of this airport, ‘Yes, we’re going to do this, so enjoy your time off’? Because that’s what we’re going to say. We’ve had an airline services representative tell us they’re not asking for a wider runway here.”

However, interim airport manager David Ruppel pointed out that the airport had received a federal grant for the widening, adding that, “if we back out of the grants, it’s never a good thing. That makes it harder for us to get grants in the future.”

The project is phased in a way that “it’s not shutting down the runway for the entire time,” Ruppel said. “It’s broken into two halves, essentially. … It’s not as if the runway is going to be completely closed for 60 days.”

Commissioner Jerry Stooksbury stressed that the financial impact of fuel sales and the impact on local businesses should be considered among the impacts of a closure, and Krenning declared that he opposed widening the runway at all.

“This strikes me as another one of these projects where we are creeping into a decision,” Krenning said. “Now, look, we’ve got the design, and the grant is all but promised, and we find ourselves being arbitrarily forced into making a decision to widen the runway.

“I’m not in favor of widening the runway. I’ve been to a number of user groups. I don’t know that I’ve heard from anybody except airport staff clamoring that we need to widen that runway. I have heard from our corporate jet owners that we will effectively put them out of business at least as it relates to NoCo, and that by putting them out of business for six months and forcing them to relocate to Metro [Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield] or Jefferson County or wherever they can find hangar space, maybe Laramie, maybe Cheyenne, that they aren’t coming back.”

Ruppel said FAA design standards require a wider runway for the type of aircraft used by corporate tenants such as Loveland-based Nutrien Ag Solutions Inc. He told Krenning that the decision needed to be made promptly because, even though widening had been part of the airport’s master plan for years, the federal grant money for the project had been in a queue and only now was being made available.

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