Surprises Found at the Airport

No one paid the property lease for one of the airplane hangars at Fayette Regional Air Center for the past 13 years. New airport manager Debra Maddox discovered the oversight. She asked county commissioners to approve a new year-to-year lease with the tenant at a meeting last Thursday, Dec 10, which they did unanimously.

According to Pct. 4 Commissioner Tom Muras, the County offered airplane owners incentives to build hangers when the airport was first constructed in the 1990s. The County offered 20-year leases on property at the airport.

In exchange, airplane owners agreed to build hangars at their own expense. At the end of the leases, Muras said, the County was supposed to take ownership of the hangars.

For reasons that was not made clear at the meeting, ownership of the buildings never reverted to the County when the leases expired. In the case of Hangar No. 5, initial land lease was never renewed, either. Maddox said the tenant has stored an ultralight plane inside the hangar for many years on land that belongs to the County, but no one has paid rent for the land in 13 years.

The new lease that commissioners approved last Thursday stipulated rent of $336 annually for the 1,680 sq. ft. of land. The hangar remains the property of the tenant.

Maddox said Hangar No. 5 and many others built during the early days of the airport were poorly constructed and are not very valuable today.

County Judge Joe Weber discussed the possibility of the County building new hangars in an effort to attract more airplane owners to the airport.

“When the county builds hangars, I like to see that, but at the same time I hate to see taxpayer money going toward that because there’s a lot of animosity out here in the county toward this little airport,” said Randy Foster, manager of Fayette Aero, a company that sells aviation fuel and other services to airplane owners at Fayette Regional.

Foster said the airport provides economic benefits to the county, but he said many residents see the airport as a taxpayer-funded amenity that primarily benefits wealthy people who don’t live here.

Weber said he wants to explore ways to make the airport into a revenue-generating department. One way would be to attract more commercial flights. Commercial planes, which require larger hangars, would provide the County with much more revenue from rent and surcharges on fuel sales at the airport. Maddox said a portion of property on one end of the airport could accommodate large commercial hangars. However, she said the County would need to obtain an easement to access that portion of the property.