BOULDER AIRPORT; Pros and Con by Bob Yates
Highest and Best Use
The Boulder Airport was opened in 1928. It is the oldest municipal airport in the State of
Colorado. And, even before it officially became an airport, Charles Lindbergh flew to its
predecessor, Boulder’s Hayden Field, during a failed attempt to land on a glacier in the Rockies
in 1923. Today, 51,000 annual takeoffs and landings at the Boulder Airport runway launch
students learning to fly, tow planes pulling gliders hoping to catch thermals, scientific and
climate-change research aircraft, life-flight helicopters, and recreational pilots. During the 2013
flood, the Boulder Airport hosted the largest humanitarian airlift in U.S. history, after Hurricane
Katrina.
However, some residents feel that the city-owned Boulder Airport is no longer the best
use of the land on which it sits. They are circulating two petitions which would place on
November’s ballot the questions of whether the 96-year-old Boulder Airport should be closed
and, if so, whether new housing should be built on the site. A group of those residents, led by
Planning Board member Laura Kaplan (but in her individual capacity), have until the end of May
to collect petition signatures of 3,401 registered Boulder voters in order to place their two
propositions on this fall’s ballot. That petitioning group faces opposition from another group of
residents, who would like to see Boulder’s airport remain open. Those opponents observe that,
regardless of the argued merits of airport closure, it simply cannot be done, pointing to federal
law, including as set out in letters which the FAA sent to the city in April 2023 and in March
2024.
As you decide whether to sign the ballot measure petitions, let’s look at the pros and cons
of the Boulder Airport and whether we should close it in order to build more housing there.
Those who have read my writing about the Boulder Airport in a March 2020 issue of the Boulder
Bulletin know that I am sympathetic to the airport’s existence. But, to attempt to present a fair
and balanced view of the respective positions in the current debate, I have dedicated about 1000
words below to the points presented by each side, largely letting them speak for themselves.
Arguments in Favor of Closure
The group that wants to close the Boulder Airport have two principal reasons they’d like
to see the facility shut: First, they say that the airport is noisy and polluting. While Boulder’s
4100-foot runway can launch only propeller planes (unlike the Rocky Mountain Airport in
Jefferson County, which has a runway long enough to accommodate jets), some residents say
that even prop planes are too loud, especially during take-off and landing. Moreover, they are
concerned that lead used in aviation fuel may adversely affect their health. They observe that,
while the FAA says that it is planning to phase out leaded aviation fuel in the United States by
the end of this decade, that may not occur and, in any event, unleaded fuel costs about $1.50
more per gallon than the low-lead version currently used nationwide.
In a statement provided on behalf of the airport-closure petition group, Laura Kaplan
wrote, “To our knowledge, no study of human blood lead levels has been done for families living
near BDU [the Boulder Airport’s call letters], despite this being requested of the city by
neighborhood activists many times in the past. Here’s some of what we do know: 95% of the
lead in aviation fuel is emitted into the environment upon burning. The fight to get lead out of
aviation fuel has been long, tortured, and filled with challenges and delays. We know enough
about the dangers of lead to conclude that having a known source of lead dust pollution (BDU)
located so close to neighborhoods, schools, parks, recreational fields, and playgrounds (which
surround BDU) is a very bad idea. We would say, unacceptable.”
The second argument posited by those who want to close the airport is that the land on
which the airport sits—which is owned by the City of Boulder—could be converted to housing,
once the runway is torn out and the hangars and fuel tanks are removed. They observe that some
portion of the Boulder Airport’s 179 acres could potentially add about 2,000 new housing units
to the 46,000 dwelling units that Boulder already has, possibly lowering housing costs for lowincome and middle-income folks. Indeed, one of their two petitions would require that at least 50
percent of housing units at the decommissioned airport site be permanently affordable units
in Boulder’s affordable housing program. The petitioners observe that remediation of things like
underground aviation fuel tanks at the airport is achievable, pointing to the successful conversion
of the former Denver Stapleton Airport to housing two decades ago.
To bolster that position, Laura wrote in her statement, “Boulder is in desperate need of
housing that is affordable to people who are not wealthy, such as teachers, nurses and other
medical staff, emergency personnel, police officers, fire-fighters, day care and elder care
workers, and retail workers. These are our valued community members, many of whom currently
drive somewhere else to sleep because they cannot afford housing in town. Even folks who are
middle income often cannot afford housing in Boulder, where our median home price is about
$1.5 million. The airport site provides a special opportunity for affordable middle income
housing which is nearly impossible to build elsewhere in the city due to lack of federal funding
to serve middle income housing needs. If we want to provide middle income permanently
affordable housing, which is widely acknowledged as essential for the health of our community,
the city must figure out ways to go it alone. Because the city owns the airport land, the city can
trade some of that land value to get exactly the types of affordable housing we so critically
need.”
As to the safety benefits that the Boulder Airport provides, the petition group says that,
even if the airport is closed, a helicopter landing pad could be preserved on the site to ensure
continued public safety operations at some level. Other public safety flights, like heavy
firefighting aircraft and tankers, are already limited to surrounding airports which have the
longer runways needed to accommodate them. The petition group asserts that some of the other
uses of the Boulder Airport—like training young pilots to fly or serving as a base for airborne
scientific and climate research—easily could be moved to other, nearby airports.
The folks who would like to close the Boulder Airport have read the FAA’s recent letters
to the city and acknowledge that opposing the federal agency will likely involve a legal fight.
But, the have argued that the City of Boulder could proactively sue the FAA to try to overcome
the legal obstacles, just as Santa Monica, California, successfully did, with that city’s airport
slated to close as early as 2029, to be converted into a park. The settlement between the FAA and
Santa Monica, after decades of legal wrangling going back to 1981, was funded by that city’s
taxpayers. But, the Boulder folks supporting our airport’s closure say that such a fight would be
worth it, asserting that “Boulder looks to be in a very strong legal position.” They observe, “It
would be to the FAA’s grave disadvantage to lose in court and establish a legal precedent for
other communities to follow.”
Laura’s group summarizes their arguments in favor of closing the Boulder Airport and
repurposing the land for housing as follows:
• Equity – using public resources to benefit not just people who own and fly in private
planes, but all community members including significant, targeted benefits to families of
low, moderate, and middle incomes.
• Community affordability and livability – creating new opportunities for permanently
affordable housing within walkable, mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhoods.
• Environmental responsibility and climate impact – ending what they assert are city
subsidies for owners of small piston-engine planes that create noise, lead, particulates,
and greenhouse gas pollution; bringing some in-commuters home to Boulder, thereby
reducing sprawl and vehicles miles traveled.
• Human health and safety – especially with regard to potential lead pollution.
• Responsible governance – reclaiming local control over the city’s land from the FAA,
with the ability to regulate and balance impacts among different groups of people as is
done elsewhere in the city.
Arguments in Favor of Retention
Just as there is a group of residents who have organized to try to close the airport, there is
a group on the other side that sees the value in Boulder’s airport and who would like to see it stay
open. They include both people who you’d expect to support the airport—like pilots and glider
soaring club members who use the facility—as well as business owners and residents who don’t
fly but who see the economic and safety benefits that the airport provides. These people are not
necessarily opposed to the city of Boulder adding more affordable housing in town. They just
observe that there are hundreds of acres of vacant land in other locations around Boulder where
housing could be added more quickly and without destroying an airport.
Aside from their arguments about the economic and safety value that the Boulder Airport
provides, the airport advocates assert that closing the airport is not even legally possible,
regardless of what the voters might say in November. They point to federal law, which says that
an airport which has received federal funding—as the Boulder Airport has through the years—
cannot be closed without the consent of the FAA. And, the FAA in its letter to the city a few
weeks ago, wrote that they were “highly unlikely” to consent to the Boulder Airport’s closure,
adding, “It is FAA’s policy to strengthen the national airports system and not to support the
closure of public airports. The FAA has rarely approved an application to close an airport. Such
approvals were only in highly unusual circumstances where closing the airport provided a benefit
to civil aviation.”
Even assuming that the FAA could be persuaded or defeated in court, the airport’s
advocates point to the local benefits that the facility accommodates:
• The Boulder Airport provides training to young people learning to fly, like Paolo
Wilczak, a 25-year-old pilot for United Airlines who, as a teenager, rode his bike to the
Boulder Airport to learn to fly. Other teenagers who recently learned to fly at the Boulder
Airport include Makayla Galler, who hopes to be an astronaut, and Gitanjali Rao, who
was named Time magazine’s Kid of the Year. United Airlines pilot Kent Katnik, who
also flies at the Boulder Airport, acknowledges that while the training of young pilots
could theoretically be shifted from Boulder to other airports in the region—like
Longmont or Erie—that won’t always work. “Access is important,” Kent says. “Some
young people don’t have the ability to go long distances to learn to fly. In addition, the
surrounding airports have limited capacity. They can’t take on everyone.”
• The airport is the command center for the Boulder Office of Disaster Management. Life
Flight helicopters are stationed at the Boulder Airport, and during the 2013 flood, the
airport was the location of the largest humanitarian airlift in U.S. history, after Hurricane
Katrina.
• Companies doing work as diverse as pilot training, climate and weather research, and
agriculture management are based at the Boulder Airport, as is the Colorado Wing of the
Civil Air Patrol. According to a 2020 report by the Colorado Department of
Transportation, about 300 jobs are dependent on the airport, with the facility generating
$55 million in economic activity each year. Airport advocates observe that the Boulder
Airport is self-funding and does not rely on taxpayer support. Rather, it actually generates
tax revenues for the city.
• Airport supporters argue that recreational flying and gliding are akin to golfing and other
recreation activities that people enjoy. They observe that no one is proposing that the city
dig up the municipal Flatirons Golf Course or close any of the city’s three recreation
centers in order to build housing at those locations.
• While some people complain about noise around the airport, its existence actually serves
as a “bubble” above the skies over Boulder, preventing commercial flights and planes
from other airports from flying too low over Boulder, per FAA rules. “We have a bubble
over Boulder and that actually reduces our overhead traffic,” says Captain Katnik. “If we
closed the Boulder Airport, pilots from other airports will fly low over Boulder in ways
that we don’t have now. We can’t simply get rid of airplanes flying overhead.”
• The airport advocates point to the fact that the FAA is on track to approve and mandate
the use of unleaded aviation fuel by the end of this decade. In the meantime, they assert
that there is no evidence of lead contamination around the Boulder Airport.
Finally, while many of those supporting the airport also support an increase in Boulder’s
inventory of affordable housing, they say that tearing out the airport and building housing in its
place is neither the fastest nor the least expensive way to create incremental housing. As
observed by former city councilmember Jan Burton in her recent guest opinion in the Daily
Camera, at least six large portions of land in Boulder are available for significant housing
development without a fight with the FAA, including: East Boulder (5,100 units), Transit Village
(1,500 to 2,500 units), CU South (1,100 units), Williams Village (600 units), Alpine-Balsam
(300 units), and—the biggest of them all—the Area III Planning Reserve just north of the
Boulder Airport (4,000 to 10,000 units). By comparison, those advocating to close the Boulder
Airport calculate that about 2,000 housing units could be placed on the airport site. Those
opposed to closure point out that, if all of the areas listed above were developed into housing to
their maximum potential, they could result in 12,000 to 19,000 units of new housing, a 25 to 40
percent increase in Boulder’s population.
While very few people are advocating for such significant growth, the point of the airport
supporters is that there is a lot of land in town on which to build new housing without closing the
Boulder Airport, assuming that such population growth is what the community wants. As Jan
wrote in her guest opinion, “The City of Boulder has a plethora of housing opportunities without
ripping out a 96-year-old airport.”
* * * * *
The fact that the city of Santa Monica spent millions in legal fees fighting the FAA over
many years reminds some people in Boulder of the $30 million of taxpayer money that our city
spent fighting Xcel Energy in a decade-long, ultimately unsuccessfully, quest to municipalize the
electric distribution system. Like the municipalization debate during the 2010s, the fight over the
airport promises to divide our community.
We’ll know in a few weeks whether those who want to close the airport will have
collected enough signatures to place their measures on the November ballot. But, even if they
don’t, the Boulder City Council will be taking up the question of the future of the airport at a
council meeting in July. Community members will certainly weigh in on each side. And, the
FAA undoubtedly will have more to say on the protection of the asset in which they have
invested millions of dollars over the decades.
You can read more about the positions of the folks who would like to close the Boulder
Airport at their website. Not surprisingly, those supporting the airport have their own website.
You can assess their respective arguments and decide for yourself which you find more
compelling. And, if you seek the city staff’s official positions, you can visit a “Fast Facts”
website on the Boulder Airport that they posted just last week.
Over the next few months, community passions will run high on the topic of whether our
nearly century-old airport should be closed. That’s what I both like and dislike about this town:
Everyone cares. A lot. If you’d like to take a break from the debate—and learn a little about the
Boulder Airport along the way—consider attending the Boulder Airport 1940s Ball on June 15.
Regardless of how you feel about the airport, the ball will be a lot more fun than local politics.
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