Nov 12, 2020 Airport Advisory Board on 2020-11-12 1:00 PM (SPECIAL CALLED MEETING)

Welcome to the Denton Airport Advisory Board meeting on Thursday, November the 12th, 2020. This is a special called meeting and the first item on our agenda is a pledge of allegiance to the flag and I'd invite those that would like to stand for that and we will say the pledge of allegiance right now. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible. And the Texas flag is honored to the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to the Texas, one state, under God, one indivisible. All right, thank you. Rachel, you have a comment to make to us before we move on to presentations or during you're going to make comments about the presentations from the members of the public. Yes, sir. Thank you, Chair. Just wanted to let y'all know we have no comments from the public for today's meeting. Okay, very good. Thank you. Well, we'll move on to the next item then and that is item 3A which is consider approval of minutes of our June 17th meeting of 2020 and hopefully you've all had a chance to review those and look through. Is there anybody that makes wishes to make any comment? Yes, Lauren. I'll move to approve. Okay. I'm moving to approve. I have a second to that. Second. I'm seconding that. So all those in favor say aye or show your hand. Aye. That motion is approved to approve the minutes of June 17th. All right, moving on to item 3B which is receive a report, hold a discussion and provide staff direction on airport rule and regulation section 5-11 for fuel storage tanks. So Scott, would you like to take this over and tell us in on what we're going to consider on this? Chair, members of the board, absolutely I will do that. I did want to say that this was an item that Chase Patterson was going to present but I'm happy to report him and his wife had a baby boy a couple of days ago so they are just getting home so I decided that he could have the day off and not come in and present today so I'll take over this item for him and it shouldn't be much of a secret. I think we've presented it several times but it's been kind of a gap between the times that we presented it, I think we started in February and then we COVID it out after the March meeting. We had another meeting I believe it was in either June or July and we talked about this item again. Since that time, Chase has coordinated with the FAA regional office for compliance and they did provide us some additional comments. We did get feedback as you recall from the last meeting from the FBOs asked a couple of questions we did forward those to the FAA as well and we did get all of that information back and we're here this afternoon to talk about basically what changed from the previous times that we had brought this item forward. Just a little history just to bring everybody up to speed if we don't recall, this item was brought forth by a request by MedTrans that wanted to do self-fueling. One of the challenges is there was already an existing city ordinance number 2008-129 which is included in your agenda packet that created certain requirements that the city put in place back in 2008. So with the questions that were provided by MedTrans and that ordinance, we did reach out to the FAA and as you recall the last time we presented the FAA had some concerns about that old policy and said that it should be repealed and that we should just update our self-fueling regulation which is also included in your packet. It's section 5-11 fuel storage tanks. So what you see in your packet that was in the red was what we presented the last several meetings and what you see in blue is what has changed since that time based on the FAA's requirement and generally it came down to FAA said to remove any fuel tank size requirement because they believed that that was arbitrary. The only way that we were able to include a gallonage is if we already had a pre-existing tenant that had a tank that was required to put in a certain size at the time. As you may recall, the only tenant that we had that was doing self-fueling up until their tank was leased to the new FBO was Nebrig Associates but that tank size that they put in was not stipulated by the city. They chose that size. So therefore the FAA said that that wouldn't be applicable in this particular case and therefore recommended that we just remove the gallons that we were requiring. One of the other questions that we were asked by the FBO was could we require whomever were to exercise this right in the future to buy their fuel from the FBO and the answer to that was no. They certainly can if they choose but it could not be a requirement to make them buy it from the FBO. So if you notice in the handout, excuse me, the attachment, the blue changes were only that fuel size and everything else remained the same. That we presented the last three meetings or so. So with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions that the board may have. Let me kind of wrap this up with where do we go from here if the board is comfortable with it. The next step in accordance with our rules and regulations and the regulatory rewrite that was passed by council, we would bring this back to the board at the next meeting for formal adoption. It has to be posted in advance in, well, now I'm not exactly sure how we're going to do it. We're probably going to put it on the website since we don't have the terminal open but in order to meet the requirements of the rules and regs, we have to post it to the public five days in advance of the next meeting. So that's our intent, is probably to post it on our city airport website, send out a notice that it is available for everybody. We will come back to the next meeting, we'll present the same information, it'll all be cleaned up without all the red marks, it'll be the final version and then the board can certainly ask any other questions. We can take additional public input if there is some and then the board at that point, if they are comfortable with it, would adopt that rule. That rule change would go into effect 14 days following the next meeting date. There is one other piece that we will be doing if the board is comfortable with this and passes it at that meeting. We will be going to the city council and actually repealing the 2008 ordinance because obviously now there would be a conflict between the two. So now with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions. Okay, very good. Does any of the board members have any questions or comments? Do you need any further detail? I think the only person or the only on-site airport person is MedTran, right? Are they the ones that are requesting it right now? That is correct. They're the only ones that we heard of now, but this would certainly allow others to have it as long as they meet the requirements that are contained herein. Okay. Okay. We haven't heard from anybody else. And just so everybody knows, Chase did reach out to MedTrans and both FBOs last week to tell when this got posted, to say it was posted, and if they have any comments, to please submit those. And as far as I know, we have not heard any additional comments. Well, it kind of looks to me like there's enough safety guidelines in here that would make it a pretty formal thing if somebody wants to go into that. They're going to have to be pretty serious about wanting to do this. It's not just something that just pop up and go get them a five-gallon can. That's correct. They will have to get their own SWIP, which is their Storm Water Prevention and Pollution Plan. From my understanding, that's about a $2,000 expense to have an engineer or an environmental firm put that together for you. You can do it yourself, I suppose. Plus, there's also training. They have to meet the same fuel training requirements that our FBO does for distributing fuel. And they also have to have the appropriate insurance. Okay. Very good. We don't require -- do we require any verification of the quality of the fuel or anything like that? Is that something we're concerned about? It's usually done by the operators themselves, but that is part of the minimum operating standards that they have to ensure that they have a process in place. The FAA can certainly ask them for that information as they see fit. When we do our annual inspections and our quarterly inspections, that information can be asked by the fire department. Okay. Okay. Very good. Very good. So at this point in time, we're just continuing on, and it will be brought back to us for future vote on it. Is that correct? I think what we need, Mr. Chairman, is if we could get a vote by the board to bring this forward as a formal rule change at the next meeting. Okay. So I'll open the floor to anyone wishing to make a motion to move this forward to vote on it at the next meeting. I will move that we move this change to the rules and regulations forward to the next meeting. Okay. Got a second on that? Hand there, Lauren. Yeah, I'll second that. All right, Aaron. Okay. We have a motion and a second to go ahead and move this forward to place it on the next agenda meeting for adoption and recommendation of council. So all those in favor, say aye or show your hand. Okay. And then it's approval on that. All right. Moving on to the next item, which involves staff reports. Since Chase is not here, I guess Scott will be doing those, or some of them, Leigh Ann, I'm not sure. But first one is the monthly operations report. Well, I'd say Leigh Ann can do it, but I don't want to scare her to death. So I will go ahead and cover them the best I can here for you. This particular phase is for October operations and September fueling. One of the notes that you probably can see, and if you've seen in the previous packets, I think were emailed out while we weren't having meetings, is our operational accounts are actually up, which is a great thing. You can see that although we did see a positive increase in the VFR itinerant, and we did see in local, which would be training traffic on the local side, we did see for October that we actually had a fairly sizable increase for the month from last year to this year of almost 11 and a half percent. It's still down overall for the year, which is not surprising. But we are hearing through NBAA that the corporate travel is increasing nationwide. So we're hoping to see that change to a positive for us. With that, you can see the fueling also is increased last year to this year. Year to date, however, you can still see that we are down almost 10 percent, most of which in the jet A, which again would be the corporate travel. We're hoping to see that obviously increasing as two things, as corporate travel starts to increase, and as you recall, the second FBO is now not grand opening yet, but they are open and they are providing services. I think we should be hearing something from them here in the next several weeks about some sort of a grand opening type of scenario in a big announcement. So we're hoping that when they do that, that maybe we can also see between the two FBOs additional traffic and additional fuel sales. There were no alerts for the month, and the incident was unfortunately our engineer, while out doing pavement analysis, unfortunately walked out onto Bravo without permission. So that was our one incident. And then we did have a number of wildlife issues, which is pretty typical for the birds during the season, and then those were -- we either used pyrotechnics to mitigate that or just chased them away. There is the attachments there, the historical operations and fuel for your information, and unless there's questions on that, I will move onto the construction side. Anybody have any comments or questions? Okay. You want to move on to the construction report? So the construction report, and this was obviously put together last week, so it's a little bit updated as of I tell you today. The West Parallel Runway Lighting Project for the most part is substantially complete. The lights are all in. The markings on both runways have been renumbered to be now 18 left and right and 36 left and right instead of 18, 17 as we were before the remarking. We have one final piece to close out this project, and it has to do with the closure that's going to happen for a couple of nights where they have to do a couple of punch list items near the runway surface. They'll be doing that at night, and then we have to reconfigure the PAPIs, which is kind of the visual approach lighting system we have on the new runway. It was set up originally to be off at night, so it had a photo cell to shut off at night, which is highly unusual. You usually don't do that, but since there were no lights on the runway, it had to be set up that way so people wouldn't try to use it in the evening. Now that system will be removed, and the PAPIs will be on all the time, and then controlled by the tower as necessary if they need to close the runway or we close the runway, they can turn the lights off. So we're excited about finishing that project. What that means now is between now and the end of the year, we're waiting for that time to pass so the FAA can publish our new approach plates to both runways, so they updated our current runway and they added the new approaches for the new runway. So now we will be fully functional all weather for both runways if either one of them is down for maintenance or whatnot. And that will go into effect, I believe it's December 30th is the publication date. In the meantime, the runway will be usable and there just won't be any changes to the approaches. And there's been a notum issued by the FAA that allows the air traffic control folks to go ahead and still clear our aircraft operators using the old approaches to 1836 to the new 18 left, 36 right, if that makes sense. So we didn't lose anything, it's just going to be a little awkward. It had to be notum to allow the air traffic controllers to issue that since the numbers don't match. But come December, it'll all go back to like it would be normally with approaches to both runways. The prox card system as we've reported in the past was completed. All of that is now remotely activated back to our offices. And I know that Jason, Leanne, and our operations folks have been diligently trying to get all of our tenants their cards so they can have access. It's actually gone fairly smooth, a couple of little hiccups here and there, but nothing that Leanne hasn't been able to find a solution for and make our tenants happy to get their cards. So we're pleased that that is finished as well. The last thing and I don't know how many have been out to the airport. There's actually the airport roads project. There's kind of a two phase approach there. The major portion of that, nearly a million dollars, was the reconstruction of several of the roadways that were failing. Those are all completed now. So the only piece that's left is the ones that weren't touched under that construction contract are actually going to be cracked sealed and seal coated under our other city contract where they do streets and so forth throughout the city. They should be coming back here shortly and finishing off all the other roads that were not touched. The street department is going to fix a couple of spots that were a little more on the minimal side but yet still needed some asphalt work. They're going to come and fix those just before they do that work and then that will finish that project. So I'm hoping that that will be done here in the next month or so. Are those roads on the north side, are they going to get the concrete curbing possibly? No, only the ones that got curbing now. The reasons that some roads have curbing and some roads don't, the main reason is the size of truck traffic. So like for the fuel deliveries or the bus that goes down to the flight school, those roads that had those heavier type activities had that added, but the rest of the roads that had just normal traffic, they did not get that. Okay, alright, very good. So anybody else have any comments or questions in reference to the construction or kind of what's going on out there? I'm sure we can find some more stuff to work on as we keep going here. I did want to say it's not really construction, but it's sort of related. We're in the process right now of getting a complete pavement analysis on the airfield. So we have non-destructive testing going on. That closure that's going to take place, that'll partially be done during that closure so we don't have to have double closures as well, that our engineers doing for us, that will then give us all of the data we need, not only for the runways, taxiways and all the apron areas, so then we can start to formulate a full-blown pavement maintenance program. And we will be getting, probably getting that data here before the end of the year. And then the million dollars that we have set aside for pavement maintenance, we will start that process probably in the spring. We'll touch almost all pavement on the airfield. Will that include kind of a reevaluation of what our weight limits are? No, our weight limit won't change. The only way we can address that is we would have to do another environmental assessment document or at least get a categorical exclusion. But for weight increases, that's not typical in order to increase the weight of our primary runway. And then when they're doing the reconstruction of that, they could increase the pavement strength. Unfortunately, that has not been approved to do that at this point. But we certainly will be in conversations with TxDOT and FAA to see at some point in time if maybe a small mill and overlay or something that could be done to provide us a little bit more pavement strength for our primary runway. Well, one of the reasons I comment that, as I see in the paper today, that Lowe's Home Improvements is going to move into one of those big new huge warehouses out there. And it's primarily for their, I guess, their mail order or online distribution type stuff. And I didn't know whether that might bring us some more air freight potential or that, you know, we might need to be able to handle maybe on a more constant basis, airplanes or bigger airplanes. Right. We have not had a direct request from them, but I will work with economic development and reach out to them and see if there is a desire to move that direction or at least have that as an option to them. Having a user, certainly as significantly as a Lowe's, it's nationwide, certainly gives us that extra push to be able to go to FAA and text out and say, "Hey, we have a user that has expressed interest, so we would like to go ahead and start that process." Right. Okay. Very good. Any other questions, comments from the other board members? Okay, Mr. Chair, the last one then is the Council Airport Committee and City Council items. Trying to remember the last time we met, we did take a TxDOT grant forward back in July. I don't remember if when our last meeting was, to be honest with you, with the board, if it crossed there, but that was all approved, that was for the lighting. Then we have a couple of lease-related items that one already did go to the CAC and I believe it was passed on Tuesday night by the council for the Plains of History. Then we have a collateral assignment for that same lease that we're in the process of working on now. Pending some paperwork, we're hoping to get a CAC meeting on the 24th and then to council on the 1st of December. That's all the items that we're working on going to council. Now, the one that we don't have that we just talked about would be the ordinance repeal and we'll work with legal just to get that one scheduled. What's the Plains of History? That was just a name. It actually isn't anything but a private used hanger and it's staying private use by the SAMHSA. I thought maybe we were having some kind of a museum or something. There is a "museum" on the airfield, it's called Hangar 10, but this one is not. This one's just private use. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Well, I do see, and I get out there quite often and I have seen some construction on some Feral and Arch hangers there. I forget what the two taxiways that it's between, but it looks like they're moving along, starting to go up with, or are they still pouring the slabs? I'm not sure. Yeah. I think that's, you're referring to Site 7, which is the large development immediately adjacent to the fuel farms that are over there and immediately adjacent to the Nebrig facility. They are in the process of building a 20,000 square foot hanger for their first phase. The second phase will be a mirror image of that right across from it. And then the rest of that property, they actually have the right of first refusal for that property if they'd like to move forward, but they kind of just got really kicked into gear here over the last month or so, so we're hoping to see that thing moving along pretty quick. Do we know if that's for existing airplanes on the airfield or is it possibly new ones coming to us? It is an existing tenant. I don't know if they've got plans to also expand to invite others. It might not be. Okay. Very good. Okay. Leanne, did you have anything for us or comments, everything? Are you working at site or are you still working from home? I actually go to site like once or twice a week, but mostly on remote. Okay. Well, I know I had a comment from a person that was trying to get their driving permit and they were a little concerned how that was all going to flow. I think it got taken care of, but did we get the length squared away that was on our regulation page on that? They added the handbook as a link underneath it. Okay. So they have access to the handbook and as far as the airport being closed, there's signage, adequate signage all over the door on who they can call, where they can drop. We have a blue drop box if they have documents they're wanting to drop off. One of the problems that we've had with the permit process is we've sent out several emails to all tenants, letting them know what the process is and maybe their sub-tenants and their landlord isn't adequately communicating with them, but right now our ops team are the only people there that are there every day of the week and so they have meetings set up so you can call them, schedule a meeting to come pick up your card because they're out in the field too. So you can't just show up and go up to the door and knock on it and expect to get your card. And when they do call, Daniel's excellent about meeting them. He lets them know he'll be a few moments, but I haven't heard any major complaints with how our system has worked and the ones that we have had, they've been, I don't want to say user error, but they weren't communicated with properly. Okay. Well, you know, and everybody thinks about that process a little bit different and it's just a matter of, but the one thing was, is they told me that when they were trying to to review what the driving regulations were, that when they were clicking on the link, it didn't either work or it took them somewhere else. Well, now it's available in two places, it's available in two spots now. Yeah. Okay. Very good. I think we got that going. So I think the last item, Mr. Chair, the last item would be the concluding item, sir. Yes. Right. That's where I was going. Okay, so we know we're going to have the fuel item coming back to us. Anybody else have any other items they want to place on the agenda or would like for staff to provide to us? One of the things I think would be interesting, if we can get it from some source, civil air patrol or wherever that maybe if we can get some aerial shots of what the runway, the new the West runway looks like with the lights lit up at night or how the new markings, you know what they look like on approach and maybe those could be emailed out to us. Let's see what we can get. Okay. Anything else? If not, I guess we will call this meeting adjourned at 1 32. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. - Thank you so much, everybody. - Bye. - Okay.