Blessed with an honest and capable Board of County Commissioners, we citizens tend to assume that major public decisions rest on facts and reason. Not so on perhaps the most consequential choice in Pitkin County’s history.
The Airport Advisory Board voted 5-2 on May 18 to recommend that the BOCC send the Federal Aviation Administration a new forecast of how many of which airplanes will fly into Aspen. The advisory board trusted county staff to report facts accurately. Alas, their trust was misplaced.
The deputy county manager’s brief claimed the forecast airline fleet meets the BOCC’s noise and emission goals. Untrue. He ignored county Resolution 105-2020’s quantitative goals, and changed its per-airplane criteria to per-passenger, magically halving the impact of doubled-capacity planes. He misled the AAB on April 20 and again on May 18.
Through 2032, the forecast’s Embraer regional jets would make the fleet noisier, more polluting and more climate-harming. By 2042, I calculated, they’d be offset by bigger but more-efficient planes, cutting CO2 12% and noise slightly but raising air pollution 41%. The forecast omits these outcomes.
Resolution 105-2020 set six specific goals from the Common Ground Recommendations: 30% less noise, CO2, and air pollution by 2030, capped airplane weight and seat count, and managed passenger growth (said as recently as his May 18 brief to mean about 0.8% per year). He claimed the forecast meets three to four of the six goals. It meets none.
Its 1.3%-per-year growth means 91,673 more passengers in 2042 than in 2022. Expansion hitches Aspen’s fate to the FAA’s own forecast predicting a half-million passengers in 2050 — ignoring all lodging constraints and other Aspen realities.
He said the county has no choice: The FAA will reject any changes, halting expansion plans and discretionary grants. Untrue. The FAA doesn’t issue non-negotiable demands. Diverging from its guidance doesn’t violate its regulations, but “must be backed up with supporting evidence” (as his slide correctly says). The forecasters apparently lacked that evidence, but now we’ve documented it all — revealing such grave flaws and gaps pervading their forecast that BOCC approval would be arbitrary and capricious.
AAB was invited to vote on April 20 before receiving that written forecast, but wisely declined. Their tabling it for a month enabled our independent assessment. We found the forecast “unsound and unreliable,” sent our analysis to all AAB members on May 14, and posted it on May 17. But at the May 18 meeting, Staff didn’t mention it, the AAB didn’t discuss it, some members hadn’t read it, and my three-minute public comment couldn’t summarize its 41 pages. Staff had earlier apparently blocked the AAB from hearing my October 2022 evidence of swiftly advancing super-clean-and-quiet airplanes, validated by the forecasters but excluded from their forecast.
Thus railroaded by staff, the AAB approved the forecast, and scuttled without a vote several members’ request to warn the BOCC about the flagship A220-300 airplane and even request its removal. Its 130 to 150 seats are twice existing planes’ capacity, and twice the valley’s stretched emergency medical capacity.
How will the BOCC consider our critical assessment of the forecast? Being nontechnical and overworked, they’ll probably ask county staff, who have privately told them our previous work is wrong, but haven’t notified us of any errors.
Now we hear that staff wants to skip the BOCC’s first reading, claiming the AAB already did it, so the forecast can be rammed through on a single reading. This is getting serious. Is staff in a hurry because their case can’t withstand scrutiny?
This community wants a great terminal but not bigger planes. Approving the forecast would trigger rebuilding the airside to let in bigger planes that we don’t need, bringing two-thirds more passengers in 2050 than we are unable to manage now. The plan doesn’t meet the community’s agreed goals nor fit its values. We can pay for the airport we want, even without FAA grants, by choosing now to retake control of the airport fixed-base operator and running it professionally in the public interest. Airside choices can and prudently should wait for at least a decade.
In our frank opinion, county staff are systematically misleading the BOCC and AAB to rush approval for bigger planes the community doesn’t seem to want. Would commissioners support asking the people in an advisory vote this fall?
Only the BOCC can fix this decision process. Those county staff who keep spreading misinformation need to straighten up and fly right.