Business View Magazine | December 2018

194 195 perimeter to be utilized for non-aeronautical businesses, as the current land within its bound- aries is close to runways and taxiways and is reserved for aeronautical use, only. He explains, “Non-aeronautical revenue is a lot better than aeronautical revenue – it’s more money and it’s unrestricted. The problem is, because it’s an older airport, we have so much infrastructure that needs to be fixed - runways, taxiways, and ramps. The City loves the Airport; it contributes to the Airport, but the dollars that we’re taking from the City, now, are for our infrastructure. Once we get our infrastructure all up to speed, then we’ll have some funds freed up and the City will be more willing to purchase land around the Airport.With our current situation now, we just don’t have the funds to do that.” The good news is that those infrastructure projects are both ongoing and planned. “We’re es- sentially going to have a brand new airport over the next five to ten years,” Valgardson reports. “We just rebuilt the commercial terminal ramp; we’re making everything stronger.We just rebuilt CEDAR CITY REGIONAL AIRPORT the south and center general aviation ramps and the associated taxiways.We’ve got a $20 million grant from the FAA and we’re going to rebuild the runway in 2020; we’re going to make it stronger. A couple of years after that, we’re going to rebuild taxiway Delta, which is the main parallel runway, and then, we’ll go and do the east ramp. So, every bit of asphalt that we have is going to be brand new over the next five or ten years.” Another long-term goal is lengthening the Airport’s main runway so that it can accommo- date the larger jets of the Bureau of Land Manage- ment’s fire-fighting tanker base on the north side of the field.“Luckily for us, our current infrastructure can handle everything, but our runway is not quite long enough for the very large aircraft like the DC 10s and the 747s that they’re starting to run,” says Valgardson.“So, if we were going to do anything to promote that,we would need a longer runway.” Finally,Valgardson notes that Utah’s Aeronautics Director has challenged all the airports in the state to make themselves ready for the com- ing use of drone aircraft. “Drones are going to