Airport Board

Airport Advisory Board Meeting Minutes Anaconda – Deer Lodge County January 31st, 2018 – 7:00 a.m. Pilot’s Lounge . Members Present: Chairman Jim Jonas, Vice Chair Al Messer, John Lombardi, Tim Casey, Randy Johnson, Eric Cortwright, Commissioner Terry Vermeire Members Absent: Nick Nardacci Others Attending: Greg Bahr, Airport Manager, Chas Ariss, Planning Director, ADLC, Carlye Hansen, Planning Department Secretary, Bill Everett, CEO I. Call Meeting to Order: Jim Jonas, Chairman, called the meeting to order at 7:05 a.m. II. Approval of Minutes: Motion was made by Tim Casey to accept the minutes from November 29th, 2017 and seconded by Al Messer, with changes as noted. Motion carried 7-0 III. Manager’s Report: Greg Bahr, Airport Manager A. DigiWx – This has been working well. He did get the main phone and modem hooked up so all is working well. Greg has gotten his books for the DigiWx training and has been studying and hopefully will be able to take his test within the next month. The last inspection was done in December, 2017 and was $711.00. This will be an every four month charge if Greg does not get his course completed. B. Maintenance – Maintenance has been ongoing. He did quite a bit of plowing due to the amount of snow that we have gotten, as well as due to the flooding that we had. He did issue a notem during the flood when the apron had 6 inches of solid ice on it on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas Day. On Christmas Day, there was flooding of the pilot’s lounge, in the hangars, and flowing outside and into the taxiway and runway. There was a lot of water that built-up in John Ford’s hangar. Four or five hangars got water and a suspended layer of ice in them. Greg would like to work with the county this spring to get the road built up to avoid this flooding and runoff. This was all caused from an ice jam on the creek. Greg feels that this just needs to be built up. The Castle next door had to pour a wall of cement and fill in the area underneath their building. According to the old timers, this is one of the worst flooding scenarios they have seen here at the Anaconda Airport. This is just something that we will need to consider looking at this spring/summer. The ditch  system, however, around the apron did do what it was supposed to do and diverted the water into the culvert as it was designed to do. The notem was sent and covered time from 12/24 to 01/02/2018. By the 2nd, all of this was pretty much cleaned up by thawing and replowing. C. Courtesy Car – We did get an award for the courtesy car. Greg talked to Bill Everett about this and he said that he is willing to add another $1000 to this, so that will be $3000 that we can put towards the car. Chas stated that Bill is going to Helena today and will be looking at police cars and whatnot and may come up with something. Al also stated that Nick is willing to sell his truck to us. Greg feels that it is going to be way out of our price range. Al stated that he only wanted $2500. Greg did have a conversation with him a couple of months ago and they were going to talk more about it. Eric thinks that it is not a bad idea as it is a 4-wheel drive truck with passenger room. Greg will get hold of both Bill as well as Nick. D. Airport Interest – As far as folks wanting to invest in the airport, there is rumor of a flight school wanting to come in, but Greg has not heard anything definite. They were asking about hangars being available and different things and then there was a person who contacted Greg about building hangars for rent and he never heard anything definite back from them. E. Fly-In – We are planning on having a fly-in this summer. So far, there are only three scheduled on the Montana Aeronautics site, but no date has been set as of yet. Greg told everyone to bring some ideas to the next meeting about what they would want to do and he will hopefully have some dates by then and will get this put on the websites. Greg feels that a bit later in the season works out a little bit better. IV. New Business: A. Fuel Farm – Rick Tabish, FX Solutions Mr. Tabish was approached regarding the fuel system at the airport. GW Petroleum out of Missoula is one of Mr. Tabish’s companies. They do a lot of aviation work. They fuel the Belgrade airport. They pull that fuel out of Newcastle. They have looked into some self-serve type of tanks for the County. This would be a 12,000 gallon tank that is split. You would have 6,000 of Jet-A and 6,000 of 100 Low Lead on this. There would be a card reader system and Bill Everett had talked about them putting this in and just managing this, which would work great. Bill was also talking about a building some hangars or something with some FAA money and in one of the hangars, they could put the module that actually runs the fuel system. The tank would be an above ground tank with a perimeter around it and it would be a double- wall tank with the secondary containment as well. A company out of Florida builds these tanks. There is also some that are available out of North Dakota from when the oil fields went down, and a lot of those trucking outfits there made these available. What happens is that these tanks are conveniently located and a plane pulls up, and they can fuel, use their card, and fuel up. The amount of the tank can be read from Missoula, so it notifies them when it needs to be filled up and they will send a load over. They are very dependable. He feels that bringing the fuel here would be very simple and that this would be on their dime. They would do all of this 2  and they would manage this with their company. Conoco-Phillips would be the supplier of the 100 Low Lead and the Jet A would probably be coming out of Montana Refining. Greg Tabish, Rick’s brother is the president of GW Petroleum and he has made the commitment to do this and there would be no cost to Anaconda. They have looked into hangars and the cost to build hangars and the cost they are coming up is about $45/square foot. He thinks they can do better than that and get a bigger bang for the buck with what they have going on with Bit Coin and Premier. Those builders are pretty aggressive and some of the building with Olympia Steel can be put up pretty quickly and pretty easily. They just need a budget and whatever that budget is, they plug this in and after talking to Bill and with some of the money that is available, they were thinking of building one hangar just for jets with the investments coming into the county. He feels that with everything that they have going with developers and things like that, there are a lot of folks within their group alone that would use the heck out of the airport and put it on the map. There was discussion about whether to use apron access for fuel or whether or not a truck would be needed. If you give these folks a discounted rate to pump their own fuel, Rick feels that this would not be a huge issue. They would be able to give them a lot of incentive to pump their own fuel with the discounted fuel. There is room for future expansion on the west of the airport property. This would be ample room to build the hangars, but the apron work would have to be done before the hangar could be built. There would need to be a manual metering system placed indoors. There was a fuel farm at the airport years ago, so there should be some conduit infrastructure out there, but no one has actually investigated this or looked at past plans regarding this. Eric asked about the maintenance costs associated with the fuel farm and Rick stated that there is not a lot. There is a testing program that they would have to look into and Rick said that they have the folks that know how to do this. Rick asked if Morrison-Maeirle was part of any of the design mechanism of the fuel farm. Rick feels that if they don’t need to be involved with this and if FAA money is not used, then he feels that they can make it pretty simple and straightforward. Rick would like to see some real time costs for this project. The issue with FAA money is that we are a year out on the hangar building. Rick states that they could possibly build it on another dime and ask that they be reimbursed. Right now, however, the apron is in rough shape and this is the priority at this time. Rick would like to get together with Greg Bahr for a second meeting regarding all of the above and the logistics involved. VI. Miscellaneous/Public Comment: None. Next Meeting: February 28th, 2018 3 Adjourn: Motion made to adjourn by Al Messer, seconded by John Lombardi. Motion carried 6-0. (Dr. Casey had to excuse himself early). Respectfully Submitted, Carlye Hansen Carlye Hansen Planning Department Secretary Anaconda-Deer Lodge County 4