Redding Municipal Airport

Garrett has no immediate plans to build any new hangars because he doesn’t think they’d sell. “You’ve got to charge a rent that’s proportionate to the capital investment, and now it’s costing upwards of 900,000 to a million dollars for a bank of ten hangars,” he remarks. “I’m not sure the market is out there for people to be paying that. You would not build homes if you can’t fill them, and you would want to make is so that you’re charging a reasonable amount of money to recover the cost of your capital. So, the more they cost, the more we have to charge.” Redding Municipal operates as an enterprise fund, which essentially means it’s supposed to be self-sufficient - without any support from the general fund. “That’s the basic rule,” says Garrett. “And if you added up my last ten years of profit and loss, we’re in the black, but not by much. I operate on about $2.2 million in sales and my expenses are roughly, $2.1 million.” Redding Municipal has two asphalt runways: 16/34 runs north/south at 7,003 x 150’; and crosswind runway 12/30, at 5,067 x 150.’ And Garrett has notions about both of them. “I would like to see some major changes to the Airport’s geometry,” he states. “Three tenths of one percent of the time, I don’t have anything other than straight down on one end of the runway or the other. So, in essence, very, very seldom do I need a crosswinds runway. So, even though, on paper, we have two runways, we only have one at a time because they intersect. And so, the smaller runway does not get a ton of use and I would like to see it pulverized, so we can lay out a parallel, general aviation runway to the east. Then, they could run simultaneous operations, and we could even entertain for an ILS (Instrument Landing System) and use it as a training runway.” Garrett would also like to lengthen the main commercial runway. “As an air carrier runway, about the shortest runway you want to deal with is 7,000 feet; and we’re at 7,003,” he notes. “So, what I would like to do is use the U.S. Forest Service that has a place on the Airport, as part of my rationale to get a runway extension. We own a sufficient amount of land on the north end of the field to extend the runway maybe 1,600 feet and end up REDDING MUNI C I PAL A I RPORT