Organizers have pulled two controversial ballot measures that would have decommissioned Boulder Municipal Airport and redeveloped the land into affordable housing, largely due to a pending lawsuit with the FAA over the city’s obligations to keep the airport operational.
byTim Drugan
Boulder’s 2024 local election just became much less contentious.
Organizers with the ballot measure committee Airport Neighborhood Campaign announced Aug. 27 that they have withdrawn their controversial measure to decommission the Boulder Municipal Airport from the November ballot. A separate but related measure to redevelop the land into affordable housing, which had also qualified for the ballot, is also being withdrawn.
It would have been the first time in the airport’s nearly 100-year history that voters decided whether to close the municipal airport. The measures were shaping up to be the most controversial local issues of this election season.
But a potential legal fight with the Federal Aviation Administration had always cast a shadow over the effort. The FAA provided the city with grant money to purchase land and maintain landing strips, and according to the federal agency, those grants include assurances that the city will keep the airport operating and maintained “in perpetuity.” So, even if the ballot measures had passed, what would come next was unclear.
The turning point for the campaigners to drop their fight at the ballot box came when the City of Boulder decided to go head-to-head with the FAA, filing a lawsuit in July challenging the agency’s assertion that the city must keep its airport operating indefinitely, they said.
Since the lawsuit was filed, the campaign said that many Boulder residents across the political spectrum have said they prefer to wait for the outcome of Boulder v. FAA before voting on the future of the airport. Opponents of the ballot measure have cited the potentially costly and lengthy legal dispute with the FAA as a primary reason not to close the airport. The case is likely years away from resolution.
“The lawsuit really changes things,” said Laura Kaplan, who has led the effort to close the airport through ballot measures. “There’s a lot of value to see the litigation come to a conclusion, and understand that, yes, indeed, we do have the right to close this airport and repurpose the land.”
The lawsuit centers on whether federal grants the city accepted decades ago to purchase land require Boulder to keep the airport operational indefinitely. The city claims it accepted two FAA grants for land purchases in 1959 and 1977, both of which included a maximum 20-year obligation. The city also asserts that other grants it received for easem*nts, the most recent in 1991, do not require it to keep the airport running permanently. According to the city, it can close the airport, but since it last accepted a grant in 2020, the earliest possible closure date would likely be 2040.
“The FAA’s position is not only inconsistent with the express terms of its grant agreements with the City but is also an unconstitutional overreach,” Boulder’s lawyers stated in the lawsuit. They argued that the FAA’s stance “wrests from the City its ability to provide for the public health, safety, and welfare of its citizens, and clouds the City’s fee simple title to the property comprising the Airport.”
The Boulder Municipal Airport began as a dirt landing strip in 1928 in the city’s northeast corner. Today it is primarily used by private pilots flying small, piston-engine aircraft, trainees, glider pilots and scientific researchers, according to surveys. Proponents of closing the airport have cited concerns over noise, lead pollution from the leaded fuel in the small planes, and the need for land to build housing.
Opponents of closure include pilots, the Boulder Chamber, business owners and other airport users. Many formed their own ballot measure committee, Boulder Airport Association-Save Boulder Airport, to campaign for keeping the airport, emphasizing its value as a generator of sales tax revenue and a resource for emergency operations. The airport is used for training, rescue missions and wildfire operations, but city fire officials note that it is not essential for fire operations given the city’s proximity to the larger Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport.
Jan Burton, chair of the Save Boulder Airport committee, said that while promoting the benefits of keeping the airport open, they witnessed a groundswell of support. “We had huge momentum in our campaign,” Burton said. “I think all indicators showed we could have defeated those measures.”
Burton said the Boulder airport community is largely in favor of moving to unleaded options as quickly as possible and is working to address the noise and air traffic issues cited in the ballot measures as reasons for closure. “We are dedicated to make this airport a good community center,” Burton said.
Studies have linked increased landings and takeoffs of lead-burning planes to higher blood lead levels in nearby children. In 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency found that lead exposure from piston-engine planes can harm cognitive function, lowering IQ and academic performance with no safe exposure level identified. Andrew McKenna, president of Journeys Aviation, the fuel provider at Boulder Municipal Airport, previously told Boulder Reporting Lab he remains unconvinced by these concerns.
Kaplan said that if she and others pushing to close the airport had known the city’s lawsuit was coming, they would have held off on gathering signatures for ballot measures. Having solid answers about the city’s standing with the FAA would give the effort more clarity, she said. And while the city waits for a court date, Kaplan believes many additional questions around closing the airport will be answered, such as how to fund the airport without FAA grants for the next 16 years assuming the city forgoes more FAA money, and what remediation of the property would entail.
“Airport repurposing is a long-term proposition,” Kaplan said. “Who knows what road this is going to take in the future. But let’s let the litigation conclude, confirm our right to close the airport, and see where we go from there.”
As it battles the FAA, the city has proposed two possible visions for the airport to the Boulder City Council. Both scenarios involve expansion. One would keep the airport open indefinitely, relying on private investments for capital improvements and maintenance. The other would close the airport, but not before offering 30- to 40-year leases to spur development and generate short-term revenue.
The airport closure campaign said Boulder has time to make this decision as a community. “The campaign for ‘housing for people, not parking for planes’ is a marathon, not a sprint,” it stated, adding that the campaign “stands ready to re-petition for the ballot measures after the litigation concludes.”
Related
Tim Drugan is the climate and environment reporter for Boulder Reporting Lab, covering wildfires, water and other related topics. He is also the lead writer of BRL Today, our morning newsletter. Email: tim@boulderreportinglab.org.More by Tim Drugan
15 Comments
Great news as it now appears the airport has to remain operational.
Why would the city want to close it anyway as this is a vital link to the future of the city. We have enough land (some of the opponents may have not noticed!) to use for development outside of the city proper. Look at Denver they closed a convenient airport then built a new one halfway to Kansas!!!Reply
High density housing will be the death of us all. We love Boulder because it’s Boulder, not Arvada. Boulder will do anything for money, these days.
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Agree!
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Agree!!
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The measure was going to fail. They are withdrawing the measure from the ballot so that they can get the airport closed without letting the people vote.
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Who benefits from closing the airport and selling the land to developers? We’re talking a LOT of money here…
My question is: Where’s our current CC coming – from greed? Altruism?
Cause they’ve got a pretty good track record of bulldozing their way regardless of what the community votes for (see BAFP) and with this kind of money involved…Reply
Tim,
When you wrote “Studies have linked increased landings and takeoffs of lead-burning planes to higher blood lead levels in nearby children.” Could you provide a reference to that study? Although the statement made it sound like the study was at the Boulder airport, I assume it was not.Reply
Hi Carl, I’m linking my previous article below on the worries of lead. Several peer-reviewed studies published in scientific journals have attested to the fact that lead exposure is a concern for children living near airports where leaded gasoline is used, like Boulder. These findings can be referenced to understand Boulder’s situation. The EPA’s endangerment finding came to a similar conclusion about the irreversible health effects, especially for children.
https://boulderreportinglab.org/2024/07/09/as-boulder-considers-closing-its-municipal-airport-to-address-housing-shortage-lead-concerns-also-emerge/
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The airport is an issue of its own, separate from housing or even land-use. The airport has treated the surrounding neighbors with little to no respect. It’s a polluting powerhouse and doesn’t belong here. It’s been given years to change its ways but instead only tries to grow and promote more traffic. I really hope we get local control and NO MORE FAA handouts for pilots. Pilots should pay their own way.
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The airport grants re funded via the Airport & Airway Trust Fund (AATF), which is paid for through taxes and fees of a range of airspace users, including fuel taxes.
https://www.faa.gov/about/budget/aatf
In other words, it isn’t a handout. Pilots are paying their way.
In other news, if one is worried about air pollution (as one should be), the fuel usage and associated pollution to the airport wouldn’t even be large enough to notice on a graph that includes other sources in the City (automobiles, busses, etc).
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The turning point came when the pro-development crowd (including one member of the Boulder Planning Board, an obvious conflict-of-interest) discovered that the great majority of residents had no desire to pursue another Muni-style rainbows & unicorns scheme that promised the illusion of affordable housing. (That’s what the Area III Planning Reserve is all about!) Just like the Muni, however, the Airport Neighborhood deal will be back at a future date, unless Boulder voters wise up and elect a more responsible city council.
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The municipalization of the public utility is a good thing that will pass.
The decommissioning of the airport is not.Reply
I seem to recall that during the 2013 flood the airport was used by the National Guard to bring evacuees from mountain communities that they rescued w their helicopters. The extra flight time/fuel consumption/pollution from having to fly to Longmont or JeffCo would have reduced the Guard’s cycle times in getting more folks evac’ed from those flooded communities and increased safety risks to the flight crews and operational expenses to the State’s disaster response budget.
As stated above, I doubt that the airport is a “polluting powerhouse”, certainly no worse than the fleets of vehicles that head to the hills each weekend to ski, hike, bike, etc. And it certainly pales in comparison to the collective impacts from the daily business of life in Boulder.
The airport’s location seems well-suited to such uses, and ill-suited to the site of a large residential housing development – at the end of a single road, atop a hill, and near the county jail. It should remain an airport, a vital element of the city’s infrastructure.Reply
Most importantly, we city taxpayers are losing out while this thing is being decided. We stopped accepting the federal grants for the airport from the FAA, so I hope we can get back what we denied so far during this folly.
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Thank you to the Airport Neighborhood Campaign. They have clearly moved the needle here and I sincerely doubt the city would have filed the FAA lawsuit if not for their efforts. I have been saying for years that the FAA contracts for BDU are a violation of our rights, but I clearly didn’t convince the right people as the Airport Neighborhood Campaign was able to do!
Further the Airport Neighborhood Campaign faced personal harassment, conspiracy theories and tons of misinformation by the pilots, chamber and so on. To my knowledge the Airport Neighborhood Campaign ran their campaign with transparency and according to city rules. The same can’t be said for their opponents. https://boulderreportinglab.org/2024/08/01/boulder-city-clerk-rules-pro-airport-campaign-violated-election-rules/
One very unfortunate side of this is what I believe it shows about the current attitudes around Boulder and a real lack of intellectual curiosity about these issues. The amount of climate change and pollution denialism as well as blatant classism are most troubling. Additionally, there is a real lack of creativity when comes to envisioning what we could do when we regain control of 180 acres of our land.
Please try to understand what a false dichotomy is. This issue is not just about selling off the land to developers. We must close the airport and we can do whatever we want with this land. Giving it over permanently to 40 pilots when there are literally 3 other airports nearby makes no sense for Boulder’s future.
We need to get real about emissions and associated air pollution. We have terrible air quality. Does anyone care to do anything about it? The fact that we allow and facilitate these planes to spew lead on us every day is simply embarrassing. There are zero electric planes at BDU and the pilots are showing you where their values are. They would rather spend money fighting to keep this absurd agreement with the FAA then “modernize” their own luxury toys.
A deal with the FAA means, no emissions controls, unlimited subsided leaded fuel, no height or noise restrictions, all for Boulder’s wealthiest residents and their hobby. We can’t even finish the Gunbarrel bike path because the FAA says no and it’s not even on airport land!
There is a huge disparity in taxes paid by commercial and private jet fliers. Commercial fliers have to pay a 7.5 percent tax on the price of tickets, which are constantly increasing. But private jet travelers only have to pay taxes on the price of jet fuel, which has remained relatively stable. That is to say that the general public funds the FAA, not private pilots.
We didn’t vote to open the airport and we don’t need to vote to close it. It’s now up to the counsel to get us out of the mess.
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