Livermore Municipal Airport Puts Growth on Pause and Revises Waitlist Policy
CA – According to officials, the Livermore Municipal Airport’s development policy has been temporarily suspended amid plans to create new regulations that will better align development procedures with city requirements and industry standards. According to city staff, the existing policy has “insufficient language that does not allow for thorough guidance in the consideration of development proposals at the airport.” Airport staff is now working with an aviation consultant on a new development policy that aims to improve upon the previous guidelines. The drafted policy will go through review with the airport commission and there will be opportunities for the public to provide their comments. The airport hosted an Open House on October 1 which provided an opportunity to showcase the airport to the local community.
Development at the Livermore Airport has been a point of contention for residents living near the facility in recent years largely with respect to a fizzled-out proposal by Oakland-based charter airliner KaiserAir to relocate its corporate offices and develop new air facilities to accommodate its aircraft, including Boeing 737s. At the time that the proposal was under consideration, residents from Livermore, Pleasanton and Dublin banded together in opposition to the expansion, citing concerns about increased noise, safety issues and the possibility of diminished property values. While the KaiserAir project was at the forefront of the debate at the time, many residents who attended that meeting spoke out against any expansion of airport uses or new development.
Livermore Airport is home to over 400 aircraft and boasts to have about the same number of hangars for local pilots and businesses. 18 of the hangars are large executive corporate-style hangars all owned and leased out by the city. The airport currently has a waitlist of 14 individuals and businesses. In the past few years, there have been raised questions about how the city has been awarding its leases and its waitlist policy. XL Aviation, a waitlist applicant filed litigation last year against the city alleging that the policy was arbitrary and capricious.
While comparable airports tend to use a simple first-come, first-serve queue when awarding hangar leases, Livermore scores applicants on a 13-point scale that reflects, at the Airport Manager’s discretion, how well the applicant will bring “revenue and business to the airport and to the community,” according to a 2010 policy statement from the city.
At issue is an Airport Commission rule that says no more than three hangars can be leased to any single individual or company and its affiliated entities. Yet one leaseholder now has five of the city’s hangars under two companies.
Pete Sandhu, who will mark his sixth year on the hangar waitlist in January, appealed his waitlist position’s scoring in 2020 and called into question the subjective aspects of the airport’s prioritization system, which has stretched the average hangar wait time to over eight years. At an Oct. 19, 2020, Airport Commission meeting, the commission penalized the score for his company, Five Rivers Flight Training, because of its affiliation with Five Rivers Aviation, another company owned by Sandhu that had built its own additional hangars.
The waitlist policy for city-owned hangars specifies a three-hangar limit for an applicant, “including affiliates.” However, Sandhu in 2020 argued that in his case, the affiliation with his Five Rivers Aviation was not relevant, because he owned that facility; he was not leasing it from the city. He also noted the policy doesn’t define what is meant by “affiliate.” There have been several other cases where the question of affiliation has come up leading to significant controversy.
Last year, the airport hired Long Beach-based consultants Aeroplex Group Partners (AGP) to reevaluate its waiting list policy. AGP recommended that the airport do away with its point system and instead follow the policies of comparable airports and prioritize applications based on application date alone.
Aeroplex also advised the city to end the Airport Commission’s practice of allowing lessees to sublet the hangars, which are municipal assets owned by the city and its taxpayers. Currently, the city allows leaseholders to transfer, sell or trade their leases.
The new policy is still in draft, and it should be in place by fall 2023