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The local debate over the future of the Aspen-Pitkin County Airport and the nature of its relationship with the Federal Aviation Administration has another player.
The Community Coalition for a 21st Century Airport on Monday announced its formation as a nonprofit organization aimed at promoting the advancement of the Airport Layout Plan and increasing community education on the Common Ground Recommendations — the product of over one year of local engagement on airport goals, codified by resolution in 2020.
The group said they will use newspaper op-eds, paid advertising and website content like an FAQ list to address questions related to the ALP, the Common Ground Recommendations and more.
The coalition has a guest commentary running in today’s Aspen Daily News. Its 33 coalition members include all five Pitkin County commissioners, some members of the Airport Advisory Board, nonprofit and business leaders, and past and current local elected officials.
Each signatory is acting in the capacity of a private citizen. The coalition is registered as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit and currently is member-funded.
John Bennett, a former Aspen mayor, is part of the coalition’s leadership group.
He fought against the arrival of Boeing 737s at the airport back in the 1990s, but said this time is different because of the Common Ground Recommendations, the need for federal funding for climate initiatives at the airport and the trajectory of wider wingspans in aviation for more aerodynamic aircraft.
Now, he wants to advocate for the Common Ground Recommendations he helped author.
“If you — the public — believe in this, you need to express yourselves,” he said.
Pitkin County Commissioner Patti Clapper, a member of the coalition’s leadership group, said the educational material is meant to help answer the public’s questions in an approachable way.
“I think the issue is so complicated and so confusing, that people need to be well informed. They need to ask whatever questions to whichever side they feel they need answers to,” said Clapper. “I think at the end of the day, more people than not will find that the information that’s coming out from the coalition is really community-based information knowledge that has been garnered and gained and vetted over many years.”
The new group comes less than a week after another citizen group, Citizens Against Bigger Planes, turned in a ream of signed petitions that could force an election on proposed changes to the airport runway.
The center of the controversy is whether the airport should widen the separation between the runway and taxiway on the tarmac, allowing access to planes with wider wingspans at the airport.
The separation currently measures 320 feet, 80 feet short of the 400 foot protocol of the Aspen airport’s design group’s size. It limits wingspan size from up to 118 feet to below 95 feet. The limitation is what the FAA calls a “modification of standards” or a “mod.”
Though the mod has been allowed at the airport for years, the FAA’s mandate to reduce mods to improve safety and access targeted the runway-taxiway separation.
The FAA has said that it will not accept an Airport Layout Plan, a facilities planning document necessary in directing funding to the airport, that does not eliminate the separation mod. Moving forward without an accepted ALP will block hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding.
Throughout the ALP process, nonprofit Aspen Fly Right has repudiated county and FAA claims and offered alternative approaches through newspaper advertisements and online essays.
Their primary throughline is that the airport can fund its own desperately needed terminal developments and climate-friendly renovations through a better contract or outright control of the fixed base operator, which services general aviation. CABP, which is aligned with Aspen Fly Right, will likely secure its ballot question. The Pitkin County Clerk and Recorder’s Office confirmed Monday that it is almost finished verifying the signatures turned in on the petitions.
Still, the coalition members maintain that their goal is not to go tit-for-tat with those advocating against widening the expansion.
“I think we respectfully disagree with their positions,” said Bennett. “I don’t want to say we’re opponents because I’m a believer in citizens coming together to find common ground and find commonality and ways to get along and agree.”
However, an issue committee, whose specific role is to support or oppose a ballot question, will be formed in the next couple of weeks.
Pitkin County has held a few executive session meetings to discuss the possible legal ramifications — intended and unintended —- of authoring their own ballot question to rival CABP’s.
The new coalition does not yet have an official position on CABP’s ballot initiative, but would support Pitkin County if the commissioners choose to put forth their own question. Multiple deadlines from the state and the federal government are putting pressure on airport-related decisions. The county clerk must send ballot language to the Colorado Secretary of State’s office by early September.
Clapper said the coalition took this long to formalize itself to present a united front.
“We wanted to make sure we had consensus by the coalition members,” Clapper said. “[The content was] carefully written and vetted to make sure it was representative of the people who signed on, rather than people just jumping in.”
For Bennett, time is of the essence as the 2026 deadline to claim federal funding from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act approach.
“Every delay and every extra month or extra six months, or extra year or extra three years, increases the probability that we’ll lose the potential of hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funding to build a new airport,” he said. “And that is serious.”
Through op-eds and their website, airportcoalition.com, the coalition members hope to add more signatories to their educational content.
Signatories include John Bennett, Dan Blankenship, Ben Bohmfalk, Ruth Brown, Markey Butler, Steve Child, Patti Clapper, Stan Clauson, Chris Davenport, Andrew Doremus, Alan Fletcher, Michael Goldberg, Greg Goldfarb, Ward Hauenstein, Meg Haynes, Francie Jacober, Bill Kane, Mike Kaplan, David Knight, Donnie Lee, Cristal Logan, Bill Madsen, Evan Marks, Kelly McNicholas Kury, Ann Mullins, George Newman, Wally Obermeyer, Greg Poschman, David Ressler, Auden Schendler, Michael Solondz, Bill Stirling and Barry Vaughan.