A political impasse that caused a partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration may have ended Thursday, but Colorado airports say damage from the conflict has been done.
The nearly two-week deadlock put at least 4,000 employees on furlough and endangered some 70,000 jobs related to airport construction. Air traffic controllers have remained on the job.
Those construction projects are especially important in Colorado and to involved workers, contractors and consultants, airport officials said.
“It’s a snowball effect,” said Jason Licon, director of the Fort Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport. “Everything affects everything else.”
Because of the FAA stoppage, the Fort Collins-Loveland facility was not issued a federal grant in time to rehabilitate its one primary runway. The $7 million project would have created 150 construction jobs.
The airport will have to wait another year to apply for the grant.
In the past 12 months, the airport has spent $35,000 on emergency runway repairs and likely will spend another $50,000 through the end of the aviation season, Licon said.
The airport is safe, he said, but it would make more financial sense to do the big project than continue to make repairs.
“The FAA cannot continue to be funded with short-term, stopgap measures, and the authority to collect aviation taxes must be remedied soon,” Licon said. “Just within the past six days, our project could have been funded over 25 times with the amount of aviation taxes that could have been collected.”
On July 22, several aviation taxes expired. Since then, the government has lost an estimated $30 million a day in taxes typically collected on the sale of airline tickets.
At Longmont’s Vance Brand Airport, the shutdown has meant that no FAA staffers can review the airport’s master plan, which will cause significant delays on construction projects, manager Tim Barth said.
“We can’t get our grant money, and we can’t pay our consultants,” Barth said.
Vance Brand also needs approval for an environmental study on the extension of a taxiway. That project is supposed to be complete in 2012.
“This has had far-reaching implications not just for airports but other industries that put people to work,” Barth said.
A Denver International Airport spokesman said a $25 million runway rehabilitation project — of which $6 million is FAA money — will go ahead in mid-August.
But because of the stoppage, the Colorado Springs Airport has pushed back a $9.6 million taxiway rehabilitation project to next year. Aviation director Mark Earle said the delay means an increase in maintenance costs and no work for construction workers.
Meanwhile, two big projects at Centennial Airport were shelved — a hangar project that needs an air-space study and the implementation of a noise-monitoring system, airport manager Robert Olislagers said.
At Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Jefferson County, workers have not been able to put the finishing touches on a new control tower because they were sent home when the impasse started, said airport manager Kenneth Maenpa. “It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not being used.”
“It’s good news that this looks like it is finally over,” Maenpa said. “But there has been a real dollar cost to all of this and it will affect aviation for quite a while.”
Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907 or mwhaley@denverpost.com
