AOPA Vice President Goes To Lone Star State To Make It
Happen
A bill that would free up funding
and create a badly needed airport in central Texas is working its
way through the Texas Legislature.
After starting in the House of Representatives, the bill has
moved out of the Senate Transportation and Homeland Security
Committee without changes and has been placed on the Senate consent
calendar. That means that it will be soon voted on along with a
raft of other legislation. Next stop, the governor's desk. Sen.
Stephen Ogden, the Senate sponsor of the bill, has championed swift
passage and worked closely with AOPA and the committee chairman
Todd Staples.
AOPA Vice President of Airports Bill Dunn and AOPA Southwest
Regional Representative Shelly Lesikar have been camped out in
Austin to make sure the bill goes through. They also have been
meeting with local officials — Mayor John Cowman of Leander,
Texas, in particular. Despite little interest from other
municipalities, including several that are flatly rejecting an
airport in their jurisdictions, Cowman has stepped forward and seen
the value of having a new airport in his area. He also was the
catalyst behind the original House Bill 2656. While a site has not
been officially selected, Cowman's enthusiasm is encouraging.
"The mayor is a dynamo of excitement over the prospect of the
airport's location and the project overall," said Dunn. "He showed
us preliminary engineering drawings on the location with runway
configuration options. A 7,000-foot runway is planned. This
progressive mayor obviously understands the positive economic
impact a new general aviation airport will have on his city. This
is the closest we've come to seeing the new airport actually being
built!"
In the early 1990s, the City of Austin began planning to close
Robert Mueller Field, an airport that served general aviation
exceptionally well with its close location to the city, and
transfer both GA and commercial operations to the distant former
military airfield at Bergstrom Air Force base. Local pilots and
AOPA recognized that that would not serve GA well and began
lobbying to keep Mueller as a GA-only facility. The city promised
— but never delivered — equal facilities for GA at
Bergstrom. So AOPA began efforts to get a new GA airport built.
In 1999, AOPA nearly succeeded in getting a bill that would have
required the state to take over Mueller, downsize it, and operate
the airport as a strictly general aviation facility.
In the 2001 legislative session (the Texas Legislature meets
every other year), AOPA helped get House Bill 2522 passed and
signed by the governor. That started the Texas Department of
Transportation on a project to identify sites for a new airport.
Unfortunately, local officials wouldn't approve any of the three
locations TDOT had picked. This latest bill reenergizes the process
of building a new airport.