Business View Magazine | December 2018

148 149 and charter airlines, will not fly into non-towered airports.We also have an on-site aircraft rescue and firefighting facility that is staffed by the City of Salem Fire Department. Many general aviation or corporate airports don’t have the on-site fire presence. But perhaps, most importantly, we have two runways, and the benefit there is that if we are doing maintenance on one, we have another runway which aircraft can continue to use. If you are a single-runway airport, and you have to close that runway, whether it be for an accident, or for maintenance, or anything else, your airport is ef- fectively shut down.We always have the ability to keep aircraft moving in and out of our facility.” Another competitive advantage at Salem is its ownership of property that can be used either for aeronautical or non-aeronautical commercial or industrial businesses. “We have several manufac- turing facilities on Airport land,” says Paskell. “We also have a couple of manufacturing facilities that are on the Airport grounds but outside of the fence. So, they don’t have access to the runways and taxiways, but they don’t need it. An inter- esting example of local aviation manufacturing is Garmin Aviation Technologies. Their aviation technology business is based here and they do all of their research and development and manu- facturing right here at that facility, so when they need to flight test their equipment they can do that here, as well.” In addition, Paskell reports that over the past year, Salem Airport has been working on creating a strategic business plan. “It’s the first one the Airport has ever created,” he says, “and the hope is that it can identify demand - not only for in- creased aircraft operations but also for the high- est and best use of the available property.” “We hope to have, as an offshoot of that, a marketing plan, which again the Airport has never had,” Paskell adds. “I think that ultimately, the PREFERRED VENDOR n Mead & Hunt www.meadhunt.com SALEMMUNICIPAL AIRPORT business plan is going to be a good guide for us and help us to understand the gap between the available property as it sits today, and what it needs to be development-ready, and then, what funding gaps there might be in terms of making it shovel-ready. Because the Airport has been here so long, the area around it has been totally developed. There is no undeveloped land around us; it’s mostly industrial and commercial, and so there is nowhere for the airport to grow.We have to look at what land we have currently available to us, and make the best use of that property that we can. More than 90 percent of our revenue re- sults from our land leases and so, assuming that is the case going forward, we really want to have a strategic plan to develop the rest of the land in the best way possible.” “It is a question of having a vision for the fu- ture,” Paskell concludes. “How can we get it from the small town municipal airport that it has been for the past 90 years, and turn it into the premier, regional, general aviation airport in the Willa- mette Valley? How do we get from A to B?”