Dear Pitkin County residents,

As former and current elected officials, climate change leaders, longtime locals, and business and nonprofit executives, we are writing to encourage the Roaring Fork Valley to embrace a critical opportunity to shape the future of our airport and manage our growth consistent with community values. 

Pitkin County has the opportunity to create the airport of the future: an airport that is safe, fiscally manageable, and accessible by commercial flights, not just privates; an airport that achieves aggressive emissions reduction and noise goals by accommodating the next generation of cleaner, quieter aircraft; and an airport that ensures passenger volume and plane size remains largely in line with historical norms. Importantly, such an airport would also include a world-leading “green” terminal with integrated mass transit that could dramatically reduce the number of vehicle trips associated with the airport. 

We didn’t come up with that ambitious list. The community did. In January 2019, the Board of County Commissioners established five community working groups made up of more than 120 citizens who worked over 15 months to create a vision for the airport and prioritize future improvements. The result was a set of bold guiding principles: The Common Ground Recommendations, which have the following Core Community Goals as their backbone: 

Those goals have informed the County’s airport process every step of the way since, from the meetings of the citizen-comprised Airport Advisory Board, to the BOCC’s airport-related meetings that followed, to the trip two commissioners and county staff made to Washington D.C. to meet with the FAA. 

And it is in support of delivering those same goals that the writers of this letter have come together as The Community Coalition for a 21st Century Airport.

All of our work—and all of the work the community has done and continues to do—is in pursuit of a set of goals for all of us, not just some of us. And they are aspirations that the community is on the path to realizing if we stay the course.  

Despite all that effort, the public is now being asked to decide the airport’s fate via a vote this fall. But the public, by virtue of the aforementioned years-long, citizen-informed public processes, has already had a significant say, probably to a greater degree than with any decision made at a city council or county commissioner table anywhere in the valley in the past two decades or longer.  

There’s now real urgency as well. Our community has serious work to do to reinstate FAA funding–which has been suspended due to a lack of an approved Airport Layout Plan–before a critical funding deadline in 2026. We are at risk of losing hundreds of millions of dollars in federal support. No airport in the country has figured out how to achieve such ambitious goals as ours without federal funds.   

As The Community Coalition for a 21st Century Airport, our commitment is to relentlessly work toward an airport that brings the best of the future. When our mission is complete, we will have safer, cleaner, quieter, more reliable air service for all, a net-zero terminal, and a multimodal transportation hub.

Please join us in a vision that truly embraces the challenges of the 21st century, a vision that inspires and lifts everyone, from the airport staff to our local workforce, the visitors to our community to the next generation of Aspenites.