Feb 11, 2021 Airport Advisory Board on 2021-02-11 11:00 AM (SPECIAL CALLED MEETING)

- Good morning, this is a special call meeting of the Denton City Airport Advisory Board for February the 11th, 2021, and the time is 11 o'clock. And so the first item on our agenda is always a Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag. And so if you put your hand over your heart and say the Pledge after me, 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, with liberty and justice for all. And now the honor to the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to the Texas, one state under God, one indivisible. Okay, welcome. Normally we see if there's any calls or anybody is wishing to speak to the board from the general public, and it's my understanding that we have not received any pre-meeting requests or there's nobody on the phone right now, is that correct? - That is correct, sir. - That's correct. Okay, all right. Well, we will move forward with the items for consideration, and the first item for consideration is a approval of the minutes of our January the 14th meeting, 2021. And hopefully everyone has had an opportunity to review those. And so I'll entertain a motion for approval if there's no comments or adjustments or changes needed to be made. So head or hand, I know Dominic's probably wasn't sure he wasn't here, so. - Oh, there we go. Sorry. - Yeah, okay. - I'm unmuted. I would move to accept the minutes as written. - Okay. I'm gonna get a second, Ann, would you second those? - Yes, I second it. - Okay, all right. So all those in favor of approval of the minutes of our January 14th meeting, raise your hand. Okay. So I think that means they're standing approved. So moving on to consideration of amendments to section four, types of meetings for the airport board's rule of procedures. And I'll turn this over to our administrative assistant, Leigh Ann, who's gonna update us on what we need to consider here. - Yeah, Chair, members of the board, staff introduced the proposed amendment to section four at the January 14th, 2021, a special called meeting. The proposed date and time change would allow for flexibility and that way we can keep our regular scheduled meeting status for things like airport business permit approval. We received one comment from airport advisory board member that requested that the meetings be held after one, one of it, when the room was available. I do understand from Scott that there are some changes that may be happening. There may be even more flexibility for that to accommodate the needs of our board members. But other than that, we didn't receive any additional comments or corrections. So staff is recommending the approval of the amendment to section four types of meetings for the airport advisory board rules of procedure. - Okay. So for clarification, we will still have a regular scheduled meeting that when we get back. - Yes, sir. The amendment right now currently has it as the second Thursday of every month, because that's what we've been able to do the last couple of months, that's when the room was available. We've been trying to do it in the afternoon closer to our time that we used to have at 5.30 to accommodate everyone's needs. The past couple of months though, those time slots have been filled. So we've had to do them earlier, but our regular scheduled meetings, according to the amendment will be the second Thursday of every month. The timeframe will just be flexible. - Okay. And Mr. Chair, if I can, what Leigh Ann was alluding to is a council request that came at the last council meeting that staff will be reaching out to all board and commission members to find out if having meetings during the day is too restrictive as they may be working, maybe a challenge to get to the meetings during the day. So they'll be gonna be doing that legwork and then we'll be getting some additional guidance back from council that may allow us to do meetings in the evening again. But we'll have to wait till that staff effort is done and then brought back to the council. In the meantime, every meeting that we've done since we haven't done our regularly scheduled meeting at 5.30 on the second Wednesdays is considered a special meeting, which does not allow us then to act on the business permit ratifications, which has to be at a regularly scheduled. Which would allow us to now have a regularly scheduled meeting so we can proceed with that requirement. - Well, I know I am concerned and I know there's a couple of our members that we haven't seen for a while and they must be having work schedule conflicts. And so I don't know, maybe they've been reporting to you all, but hopefully we can get some work done on that. So moving forward now, it's my understanding that this will be scheduled for a vote at our March meeting. Is that right? - For this meeting, we're proposing the action item at this meeting. - At this meeting, okay. - Yes, sir. - All right. So I guess any board members have any comments or questions about this? - I'm good with it. - Okay. All right. Well, I guess we can, since we do have four Dominic with us this time, and we'll get a chance to talk to him a little bit later, having introduced himself to us. But I'll entertain a motion that we approve this change to amend section four types of meetings for the airport board. So Anne, Ed, Dominic. - I propose that we approve this amendment. - All right. Anne's making the motion approval and Dominic's gonna second it. Is that what I saw? - Yes, sir. - Okay. All right. So all those in favor for this approval of the amendment, raise your hand. Okay. We got four. All right. So moving on to item C, consider approval of amendment to section nine, officer election of the airport board's rules of procedure. And so Leanne, you want to go through that for us? - Yes, sir. I am chair of members of the board. The staff introduced the proposed amendment also at the January 14th, 2021 special called meeting. At that time, the proposed language that we gave you guys, it allowed for the board to elect officers annually as soon as practical after the annual appointment process. It also allowed for the board to elect officers at one meeting instead of having two meetings like we currently have. That was all that we proposed to change it to. We recommend approval of the proposed amendment to section nine of the airport advisory board rules of procedure at this meeting. We did not receive any comments or corrections on that item. - Okay. All right. So I think for review previously, wasn't there something in there, Scott, you might recall more on this, something that every time a council person appointed a new board member, we had to hold election. Is that correct? - That was the general rule of thumb, yes, that every time a new member was appointed, that we would have to go through that process, which means you could actually have elections of officers multiple times a year. So in order to reduce that confusion, be more in line with the new handbook, we pretty much adopted language that's in the handbook to do it once immediately following what is usually a standard appointment process that the council will do. This year, obviously because of the delays with election, it got pushed rather late this year. So it'll get back on the right schedule and then we will do it immediately following that appointment process. - Okay. So typically, if everything was in a normal world, council makes those appointments usually in July by the end of August. - Correct. - And new terms start kind of each year in September. - That's correct. - So that's when we would most likely do it is in September. - That's correct. So we will follow whatever that is. If there happens to be a delay, it'll wait. So this year, the current 2021, we will actually do elections twice because your appointment I think is the final one, which should be next Tuesday, I believe. We will come back at the next meeting and we'll do election of officers. Then when they do the next appointment selection, which I think like you said would be in the July, August timeframe, we'll come back and do it again. And then it should end up on an annual cycle after that. - Right. Okay. Very good. Any board members have any comments or questions about that? Okay. So hearing none, we'll move forward. I'll entertain a motion that we approve the amendment to section nine, election of officers for the airport advisory board. - I'd move to accept those changes. - All right, Ed and Anne or Dominic want to second it or Dominic's going to second it. And so for all those approving this amendment, raise your hand. Okay. We have four. All right. Okay. Moving on to item D, receive a report, hold a discussion, give staff direction regarding the airport advisory rules, a procedure update and replacement. So Leanne, you will be handling this again. - Yes, sir. - I'm going to share my screen so you all can kind of see, can you guys see that? - I can see it, but it's not readable to me, but that's okay. - Is that better? - Yeah, it's a little better, yes. - I've tried to enhance it. - Chair, members of the board, the staff is proposing the attached update and replacement to the airport advisory board rules of procedure. It's exhibit six in the packet that you guys were provided. The proposed document or attachment, it conforms with the requirements of the code in the handbook. Staff worked with legal diligently over the past couple of weeks to try to make the bylaws match the code in the handbook as much as possible. In accordance with section 2.14 of the airport advisory rules of procedure, the staff is introducing the proposed draft replacements, and we intend to bring a final draft to the March 11th, 2021 meeting if there are no comments or corrections. If you guys have had time to look over that, we're open for comment. - Okay, I think that's pretty standard fair, I think, for how the other boards operate in the city, so I don't have any comments or about it to anybody else, okay? - So are we voting on this to put it on the 11th agenda? - It'll be an action item on the next agenda, as long as we don't have any comments or corrections to be made, but as I'm understanding it, there's no comments or correction, I'll find what that as is. - Okay. - And Mr. Chairman, when we do bring it back next month, the board certainly has an opportunity to make corrections if they feel necessary, if we have other members that show up. So at this point, we'll bring back Exhibit 6 as presented tonight at the next meeting, and then we'll just open it up for discussion and action by the board then. - Okay, very good, very good, all right. Okay, so now that moves us to our normal reports, and Chase Patterson, our operations manager. Chase, do you have some interesting details for us? - That's correct, Mr. Chairman, members of the board, I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen for this operations report, as we do have a few new documents we had added this month. Let me go ahead and share that, can everybody see that? - Yes. - Okay, so we'll start with our monthly operations for January 2021. As you can see, we did start over with our operations count. That's on a calendar year basis, down about 7% from January 2020, with 9138 operations compared to 9830 in 2020. We did have a lot of, not necessarily rain days in January, but there were quite a few crosswind days that really hurt our operations this month. You can see a large chunk of that was in our local operations, those smaller aircraft can't fly in those heavy crosswind situations. So I don't expect that there was any huge indication of a drop-off, just some high wind days and things like that. We'll move down to our fueling, we have a regular fueling table here, total up for the year, 13.4%, with an 8.6% increase for this December, compared to December of '19. I wanted to open up this screen because at the last meeting, Mr. Chairman, you requested a breakdown by FBO. I put it in very similar to the fueling table that we have. Now, if Mr. Chairman, if you or any other board member would like this just in an overall total format, we can definitely do that. I know it gets confusing with the not applicable because U.S. Trinity was not in business back in December of 2019. So if that's something that a change the board would like to be made, we can actually make this a little simpler table and just do the totals. But I wanted it to compare to the actual table we had. As you can see, U.S. JET's total is down for the actual month or for the year that that's picked up from the U.S. Trinity total down at the bottom. So this is something, like I said, that's new, but it can be modified as the board sees fit if there's any comments on that. >> It looks very good to me. >> Okay. Perfect. >> Any other board members have a comment about that? >> Okay. All right. So we'll move down to our based aircraft, which we do have an update for this month with a total of 385 based aircraft. You will see that is quite a jump from November of '19 at 321. But Mr. Chairman, members of the board, if you recall, U.S. aviation did consolidate a lot of their flight school operations from Alliance as well as Chairman Denison down to Denton. So we did see an increase, I believe, roughly 40 to 50 aircraft from that alone. And then increased based aircraft with the new FBO as well as filling up of our current FBO. Now, I will say that I do believe this number will fluctuate, could possibly go down as COVID restrictions lift and U.S. aviation starts to diversify again with where they're having their aircraft. So don't be alarmed, I guess, if you see next year we're down in the 340, 330 range again, just depending on how they allocate their aircraft to their different locations. So move down to alerts. We did not have any alerts. Now, we did have an incident that came in right at the beginning of this month. Had a pilot land on the runway, try to slow down and make a taxiway exit. Did end up in the grass, but promptly pulled right back up on the runway and taxied off. We did have a globe that was hit and repaired immediately. Did get all the pilot information, put a report in and got that information to the tower. No injuries reported and no other damage. The light, I don't know how the pilot did it, but the globe broke and the light still worked. So it was interesting. So I haven't heard any reports of major damage to the aircraft or anything like that. So move down to wildlife. Did see a large, large amount of bird activity. Only one strike, luckily, on 1-8 right, we did find some remains of a starling there on runway 1-8. And we did notice a lot of bird activity this last month. We did have some warranty work that was completed on our new runway. Some seating of the runway edges. So that accounted for a lot of bird activity, a lot of dove and starling activity along the runway. But we did only have one strike, no damage reported. I'm sure the pilot didn't even know that it happened. So it was good that there was no damage on that. So I'll move down if there's no questions on any of that, I'll move to historical operations. So we have our historical operations, we bumped it from 2010 to 2020. We bumped it up to 2011 to 2021. So that's there for everyone's review as well as historical fuel. Now the new piece that I wanted to talk about was the overall FAA control tower annual aircraft operations. So we did get this report, it goes for, there's a total of 520 airports in this report. With us, where it stands in the country, I'll move down to our page here. I know it's very hard to read, we're here at number 85. But overall in the country we stand at 85. Of these labeled in orange here, these are contract towers. We finished 12th overall amongst contract towers throughout the country. So that's a very, very good standing. Statewide overall, we finished 8th and that accounts for all airports of any size in the state. So that includes your DFWs, your Houston Hobby, Bush Intercontinental, as well as Dallas Lovefield. The two GA airports that finished above us were McKinney and Fort Worth Meacham, but we are 3rd amongst contract towers in the state of Texas. So 8th overall and 3rd amongst contract towers. Now I don't know if the board may recall in the past, we were kind of in that 100 to 120 range, I believe, over the last couple of years. I do expect that to come back down. We might be in that 100 to 120 range. We did see some of our sister airports in the area see a large drop off in operations. And based on our last meeting, we didn't see really any drop off in operations. We were roughly 400 off of our pace from last year. And that's really, you know, considering we have 138,000 operations a year. So I do expect some of the activity from folks right below us to pick back up so we could see a change in ranking there, as like I said, we did not see any significant drop off in operation. And we understand that maybe the towers count differently and that could affect the number as well. Now, there's no some of these, you know, a lot of these counts are done on pen and paper. You know, this is always a chance for, you know, human error, but I haven't found anything that says the towers count differently. Now the FAA counts every year are a little different from our tower counts. And we can't get anyone in the FAA to determine the reason for that. But we as you know, we don't count over flights and stuff and hours. So there could be some of that going on from the FAA standpoint, or just, you know, and based on based on what we found, there's no significant difference in the way the actual towers count operations. I guess I'm kind of surprised that McKinney's activity is higher than ours. Well, they have been have been recently in the last couple of years. They have been higher than us. Now, I will keep an eye on that. I don't know exactly what their their the reason is that they are higher, but they have jumped up ahead of us in probably the last two to three years. Now, as you see, McKinney's right here at 82, so very, very close to what we are in the rankings. So I would think with our second runway, we, we should show some increase in activity. We could. And if you remember, Mr. Chairman, members of the board, we have not, we've yet to have a full uninterrupted year of two runways. We had the runway put in and finished in November of 19 timeframe, December of 19. And then we had to shut it back down in mid mid 2020 due to the lighting project. So we still haven't had a full interrupted 12 months and we'll closely monitor that. Now we don't have operations based on runway. We will have them total and we'll keep an eye on on what we see increase wise over the the next 12 months. Okay. That's going to be it for the operations report. I'm going to make a comment to chase. I don't know if you noticed it or not. You know, I kind of keep an eye on what's going on at the airport to flight aware. Yes, sir. That flight aware website. And they've started showing a graph at the bottom that kind of compares last year to this year. Okay. And I don't know that that means anything to us because it might be that, you know, because there's a lot of operations out there that don't file flight plans that wouldn't show up on that, but that might be something that you if you if you weren't aware of that, you might take a look at it and see if there's any usable information there. I'll definitely take a look at it. Like you said, there are there are quite a few that don't, you know, if you're flying VFR, you're not going to be on there. And then there's some folks that like to keep their stuff private, but I'll definitely take a look at that graph. And if there's usable information that the board might be interested in, we can definitely look at presenting that as well. Okay, good. All right, I'm gonna unshare this page. Any questions on the operations report? I don't have any. What about the rest of the board members? Okay. All right. So I guess that kind of moves us down to concluding items. And this is our opportunity that we can. Mr. Chairman, I think I think Chase still has the construction report. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I overlooked that. I apologize. No problem. Mr. Chairman, we have just just two items left on our construction report. One of the status on changes still the pavement management program. We did get word from our consultant that they did receive the final data from from the heavy weight or heavyweight deflector testing folks. And then we did. They did provide us a possible date with their their findings will so we'll get a draft hopefully in the next six to eight weeks of our of the findings in our in our program. And then we'll report once we get our final report from them will report that to the board. Okay. All right. And we did add air for air traffic control tower upgrades. We do have an RFP out right now for upgrades to the control tower equipment, adding spare radios, adding a whole new voice switch system. A lot of our equipment up in the towers is very outdated. So that RFP is on the street right now with questions that came back today. We'll get those questions answered for the folks who submitted and then hopefully have someone picked in the next couple of weeks. Now that'll have to go to to council in April or May once this the whole process works itself out and hopefully get started in the June timeframe. Okay, good. Is that is that going to be paid for through a sharing grant or is that on the city or it's not it's it's something that we've we budgeted for and we have a project for for us now. Obviously, depending on what it's come back and things like that, we may be able to supplement with grant funds to some extent now, but we did not receive a full grant fund for that project. Okay, Mr. Chairman, we we may be able to use our CARES Act fund, which which we had intended on using for some lighting. Unfortunately, TxDOT and the FAA is still trying to figure out a process to allow us to expend those dollars, but because the tower equipment is eligible for that, we may may choose to use that grant funding for this project supplemented by whatever monies that we have for the project ourselves and then return the balance if there is back to the airport on allocated fund to use for other projects. Okay, very good and it sounded to me like you're kind of replacing outdated equipment and backup and you're adding backup equipment. Is that what we're doing? Are we just kind of putting new stuff in and sliding the old back as the backup or correct? We have we'll we'll have new radios. So the main backup equipment that we don't have currently is backup radios, standby radios. So we are adding two new standby radios. Now, once this project comes in place, they'll determine the need to put those in as our main radios or leave them in a standby position. That'll be determined once the project gets started. So everything else is a new system, a new voice recording system, a new, you know, basically new boxes for the controllers to plug in and communicate on the on the frequencies. Well that's great. I'm glad we're getting the chance to upgrade that and stay on top of it. Absolutely. Any, any questions on the construction report? All right. Thank you. Okay. All right. Now, maybe we're ready to move to the concluding items. Well, there is one more. The Council Airport Committee. Oh, yes. Yeah. And I don't think I saw anything new on that or is Leanne pending items for Council Airport Committee or the City Council. Okay. Good. And I see the hanger construction is continuing down there in that one area. So and I saw that the fire department is received the new fire truck. And I guess we'll get a chance to take a look at that here when the weather gets warmer maybe and kind of maybe we get a chance to meet again. Very good. So any board member have anything they want to put on the agenda for next meeting or something we need to get clarified or something to move forward with? Mr. Chairman, I do have one item to bring to the board's attention and you'll be receiving an email from Leanne with some additional information. It's regarding the city's ethics policy. As many of the members may remember the city went through a process and adopted an ethics policy that includes certain boards and commissions that have to fulfill certain requirements, watch videos and sign some documents. This board is not one of those. However, we do believe now because the board in Chapter 3 has rulemaking authority it would be advantageous for the members to just watch the video that is available to them. So we'll get some more information. People are going to provide us the specifics and we'll get it out in an email to the board and you can just watch it as your leisure. If there's any questions or concerns, we can certainly address those at the next meeting if necessary. Okay. All right. Well, I don't know what happened to him. I saw our new member Dominique Beecham. I don't see him on the screen now. I don't know unless he's on a different screen. My computer, did he drop out? He is not currently on the call. Okay. So I guess we can wait till next meeting to learn a little bit more about him, let him introduce himself. So if there's no other business or activity or comments that need to be made, I guess we can consider this meeting adjourned. So it looks like the adjournment time will be 11 33 a.m. So thank you all for your time and look forward to seeing you at the next meeting. I mean, what did you say, March the 11th? Yes, sir. I have it set for 1 p.m. and I'll get the calendar requests out to you guys. Okay. All right. Very good. Okay. All right. Thank you.