Boarding call: market turbulence rattles state's small airports.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Air transportation industry

Hal Shepherd, city manager of Cortez, the small-town gateway to Colorado's Four-Corners region, no longer flies to Colorado Municipal League meetings in metro Denver. He's missed. "We miss having contact with Hal and other Southern Colorado officials greatly," said Ken Bueche, executive director of the league, who says most of the league's monthly regular meetings are held on the Front Range, although various special events are held on the Western Slope.

"We don't see enough of Southern Colorado officials," said Bueche.

That's mostly because flying from the far southwest corner of Colorado to Denver International Airport is usually an expensive proposition--from $223 per person, advanced booking, roundtrip, to $363 on one day's notice--and the six-hour drive to Denver is not only long but often dangerous. "We've got two mountain ranges to go over, and sometimes in winter it's just not possible driving them safely," said Shepherd. And yet, business in Cortez sometimes requires the trip.

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"Denver is the state capital, and there are a lot of people who go up there because of state capital business," said Russ Machen, manager of Cortez Municipal Airport. Machen's airport is one of three in Colorado where daily commuter air service to DIA, currently provided in Cortez by Great Lakes Aviation, is 100 percent subsidized by the federal government. Yet the city is being asked by the Bush administration, in its 2005 budget, to assume a portion of that subsidy--10 percent--if it wants to keep the service. Machen said that match could amount to as much as $100,000 per year.

"It couldn't come out of the airport budget," said the manager. "We only bring in $130,000 or so anyway, and if I lose $100,000 of it, we shut the airport down."

The Colorado Aeronautical Board did a study, finished just last November, of the state's 13 commercial airports, and pegged the Cortez airport's economic impact on the region at more than $20 million. It directly provides 312 jobs and an $8.2 million payroll. "We could not arrange for an airline to come in here without a subsidy," Machen said, "and if we lost an airline, it would devastate the airport. There would be a domino effect: We'd lose the car-rental (office-lease) revenue because there's no passengers to rent cars to; we'd lose the fuel-sales portion that's attributed to the airport; we'd lose the advertising for the signs in the terminal building and the concessions, it's all gone."

Shepherd says somewhat plaintively that he, too, misses going to those Colorado Municipal League meetings, where issues are discussed that relate to all sizes of Colorado communities--from Wheat Ridge to Cortez and Durango. "Our community's business is as important as the business of the...