Business View Magazine | February 2020

116 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2020 our terminal apron for commercial aircraft parking by 110 feet, so that we could get a fifth airplane parked on there, overnight. In addition to that, we replaced all the asphalt and did a bunch of earthwork down at the fuel farm, and we expanded the TSA area in the terminal to get ready for a second TSA line going in. “That was, hopefully, going to be done in November, but TSA was behind schedule as far as moving the equipment, so that’ll probably be the first of the year before that actually happens. But we went in and did all the pre-work; we tore out the wall, put in a big roll-up door so that now they have access to more of that area; did all the underground work, including tearing up the concrete and putting in new electrical and data conduits and lines, so when the TSA has the equipment ready for us, they can come in and install it. It’s all ready for them – they can plug and play. The inside of the terminal was painted, and we put in an 18 X 7 foot-high, digital display advertising board that’s pretty phenomenal. So, a lot of stuff happened during that time.” In addition, several businesses saw the shutdown as the perfect time to build new hangars. “We ended up having three completed during that time, two more are under construction, and we have two more that will probably start construction next month,” Stehmeier says. “We had 93 hangars when we shutdown; we have about 100, right now. We had three corporate- type departments come in and build hangars, 120 X 100, or even bigger than that – big hangars for jets.” Regardless of the good news, conventional wisdom suggests that if an airport is closed down for that length of time, its bottom line will suffer. At St. George, the numbers bear that out: its passenger count went down 14.6 percent – from 140K in 2018 to 116K in 2019. And yet, Stehmeier believes there is a silver lining to be perceived within that statistic. “On that day, the 27th of September, when we reopened, we also started a brand new air service route – direct