The Lost Landing ✈ KLMO

Longmont, Colorado • Vance Brand Municipal Airport (KLMO) • The complete file

We Pay. They Fly. Three studies the City of Longmont paid for. Read together, they tell one story — and it is not the one we’ve been told.

137,452 aircraft movements crossed Vance Brand’s runway in 2025. Nine in ten were single-engine training aircraft. Of every visiting aircraft the City’s own fee model counted, 88.8% weighed less than a small car. Anything in the business-jet class landed here 47 times all year — fewer than once a week. For all of that traffic, Longmont collected $8,135.82 in fuel money and nothing at all for the runway. And the airport fund is projected to go insolvent in 2028.

Every figure on this page is the City’s own — page-cited
Flights over Longmont, 2025 137,452 counted by ADS-B, not estimated — up 8.6% in one year
What the City collects per flight 7¢ fuel flowage plus ramp fees, across 137,452 operations. Landing fee: $0
Staff running it 1.5 FTE on 261 acres, no control tower — the third-busiest field in the City’s own comparison
Airport fund by 2030 –$227,446 the study’s own status word for it: “Critical”

The headlines

Twelve numbers, and where each one comes from

Nothing below is an estimate, an advocacy figure, or a number from the neighbors. Every one is printed in a document the City of Longmont commissioned and paid for. The page numbers are the studies’ own.

137,452

Aircraft movements at Vance Brand in 2025 — up 8.6% from 126,607 the year before. For the first time these are counted by ADS-B, not estimated.

Noise Program Assessment, p. 7
91%

Of those movements were single-engine fixed-wing aircraft — overwhelmingly Cessna 172s and Piper PA-28s, the standard equipment of flight training.

Noise Program Assessment, pp. 10–11
88.8%

Of the 42,049 visiting aircraft arrivals the City’s fee consultant counted, nearly nine in ten weighed between 2,000 and 3,000 lb — light trainers.

Rates & Charges Study, p. 28
47

Visiting arrivals all year by any aircraft over 12,500 lb — the business-jet and turboprop class. Fewer than one a week. This is not a corporate airport.

Rates & Charges Study, p. 28
$8,135.82

Everything Longmont earned from fuel in 2025 — the airport’s cut of 135,597 gallons burned over our neighborhoods. About six cents per flight, from fuel alone.

Rates & Charges Study, p. 25
~40

Overnight ramp stays billed in a year, implied by the study’s own $1,400 revenue estimate. Visiting aircraft almost never stay the night.

Rates & Charges Study, p. 36
$0

The landing fee at Vance Brand. The study’s own fee table lists it as “NA.” Every one of those 137,452 movements used the runway for free.

Rates & Charges Study, p. 13
1.5 FTE

The staff. Rocky Mountain Metro runs 191,533 operations with 25 people and a tower. Centennial runs 314,071 with 24. Longmont runs 126,600 with one and a half.

Rates & Charges Study, Exhibit E, p. 67
67%

Share of all general-aviation flight hours that are personal or recreational use — the FAA survey figure the City’s own consultant cites in its market section.

Rates & Charges Study, p. 9
–$227,446

Projected airport fund working capital in 2030. It turns negative in 2028. The status word the study assigns is “Critical.”

Rates & Charges Study, pp. 37–38
$926,700

Unfunded capital projects already identified for 2026 — on top of a $1.01 million project that is funded, and $2.07 million more queued in the capital plan.

Rates & Charges Study, pp. 37–38
GA 24

FAA Grant Assurance 24. Longmont has already promised the federal government it will keep a fee structure that makes this airport as self-sustaining as possible.

Rates & Charges Study, pp. 5, 8

A field that runs six figures of traffic, hands the City seven cents a flight, charges nothing to land, and is projected broke in two years. Every one of those facts is the City’s own finding.

The record

Three studies. One conclusion nobody has said out loud.

None of these were written by residents. Two were commissioned and paid for by the City of Longmont; the third is the State of Colorado’s. They were produced independently, for different purposes, by different firms. Put side by side, they answer three questions: what actually flies here, what it leaves behind, and what it costs us.

City-commissioned · 2026

Rates and Charges Study

Bolton & Menk, for the City of Longmont

Benchmarks lease rates against seven comparable airports and — in its own words — analyzes “the utility and financial implications of implementing landing fees on aircraft operating at the field.” Contains the five-year budget projection, the peer comparison, and a complete arrival-by-weight count of every visiting aircraft.

The financial half of the file. 108 pages including six exhibits.

City-commissioned · 2026

Noise Program Assessment

Airport Monitoring Systems, for the City of Longmont

Presented to Council as Item 9.B on July 28, 2026. Its lasting contribution is not the noise findings — it is the first real count of Vance Brand. It threw out the FAA’s planning estimate as “not considered reliable enough for this project” and counted every movement by ADS-B instead.

The operations half. Two full years of counted data, 2024 and 2025.

State of Colorado · 2025

Aviation Economic Impact Study

CDOT Division of Aeronautics

The source of the “$73.6 million economic engine” figure quoted every time the runway’s free ride comes up. It is gross business revenue including multiplier effects — not City income, not a surplus, and not money anyone in Longmont can collect.

The claim. The other two documents are what happens when you test it.

Why this matters. Each study, alone, is easy to wave off. The noise report is “about noise.” The rates study is “just a benchmarking exercise.” The economic-impact figure is “what the State says.” But they were built independently and they corroborate each other on every number that matters — how much traffic, what kind, and how little of it turns into anything Longmont can bank. That triangulation is the whole case.

Part one

What actually flies here

A training field for other people’s students

Start with the thing nobody could measure until now. Vance Brand is non-towered, so for decades its traffic was an FAA planning estimate. In 2026 the City’s consultant replaced that estimate with a count — and said plainly why.

“FAA provides operations data for airports across the United States; however, for non-towered airports, this data is based on estimates and is not considered reliable enough for this project.”

— Noise Program Assessment Baseline Report (p. 7)
137,452 counted movements in 2025 — up 10,845 (8.6%) from 126,607 in 2024
91.4% single-engine fixed wing — 125,666 movements. Most common types: Cessna 172, Piper PA-28
~40% are local operations — pattern work and touch-and-goes. Roughly 55,000 laps a year
82.5% of all the growth from 2024 to 2025 came from that one single-engine category

The growth is training, and it isn’t skydiving. Mile High Skydiving — the operator residents most often name — actually declined from 4,479 flights in 2024 to 3,945 in 2025, a drop of 11.9%, while the field overall grew 8.6%. Of the 10,845 additional movements, 8,950 were single-engine fixed wing.

Mid-week is the peak. The busiest days of 2025 were Wednesday (16.8%) and Thursday (16.4%); the quietest were Sunday (12.4%) and Saturday (12.6%). A field dominated by weekend recreational flying looks like the opposite of that. This one looks like a business running on a schedule.

The single most revealing table in the file

Every visiting aircraft, weighed

To model a landing fee, the Rates and Charges Study had to count and weigh every arrival at Vance Brand by a non-based, non-government aircraft. It found 42,049 of them in twelve months. Here is the distribution — and it settles what kind of airport this is.

Visiting arrivals in the business-jet and turboprop weight class — everything over 12,500 lb, for the entire year… 47 Fewer than one a week. At the study’s own $3 rate they would have generated $4,754 — 1.6% of the total. The “business aviation gateway” does not show up in the data.
…while arrivals in the light-trainer band alone, 2,000–3,000 lb, numbered… 37,337 88.8% of every visiting arrival, and 85.7% of all the revenue a landing fee would raise. The traffic is trainers, and so is the money.
What the studies say the airport is for
What the studies’ own data show
“Aerospace and advanced manufacturing represent a rapidly expanding sector… These operations bring high-wage technical jobs to the community and reinforce the importance of regional airports—such as Vance Brand Airport—in supporting business aviation and logistics.”
— Rates and Charges Study, p. 4
47 visiting arrivals a year over 12,500 lb. 164 over 9,000 lb. Business jets and turboprops are a rounding error in the same study’s own arrival count (p. 28).
“Business aviation supports executive mobility, supplier access, engineering and technical travel, and regional market connectivity.”
— Rates and Charges Study, p. 5
Personal and recreational use accounts for 67% of all GA flight hours nationally — the FAA survey figure this same study cites four pages later (p. 9). At LMO, 91% of movements are single-engine and 40% never leave the pattern.
The State’s economic-impact study credits the airport with $28.9 million a year in visitor spending — people flying in and spending money in Longmont.
The City’s fee model prices overnight ramp fees at about 40 billed nights a year (p. 36). This ledger’s own ADS-B counting finds fewer than one runway use in twenty is a real stop. Three independent sources, one answer: almost nobody comes to town.

Strip the language away and the data describes one thing: a runway used, tens of thousands of times a year, by light aircraft practicing landings.

Part two

What it leaves behind

Seven cents a flight

Here is the arithmetic that ought to end the “economic engine” argument on its own. Take everything Vance Brand collected from the act of flying in 2025 — fuel, ramp, landing — and divide it by the number of flights.

Fuel sold at the airport in 2025 — 135,597 gallons — at the City’s fuel flowage fee of 6¢/gallon $8,135.82
Overnight ramp fees — roughly 40 billed nights a year at $40 ~$1,600
Landing fees on 137,452 movements $0
Touch-and-go fees on roughly 55,000 pattern operations $0
Everything above — $9,735 — divided by 137,452 movements $0.07 / flight

Fuel gallons and revenue: Rates and Charges Study, p. 25. The ramp figure is derived from the study’s own estimate that raising the overnight ramp fee from $40 to $75 would add $1,400 a year (p. 36) — which implies about 40 billed nights. Movement count: Noise Program Assessment, p. 7. Landing fee: the study’s fee table lists LMO’s as “NA” (p. 13).

135,597 gallons of aviation fuel were burned over this town last year. Longmont’s entire share of that was $8,135.82 — less than the airport spends mowing its own grass (about $20,000 a year, p. 25). Our fuel flowage fee is the lowest posted anywhere in the comparison set: Boulder charges 10¢, San Luis Valley 10¢, Rocky Mountain Metro up to 18¢. We charge six.

And they do not stay. The City’s own consultant priced the overnight ramp fee increase at $1,400 a year — about forty nights. Not forty a month. Forty. Independent ADS-B counting on this ledger reaches the same conclusion from the other direction: fewer than one runway use in twenty is an actual stop of twenty minutes or more.

The $73.6 million, measured against the books

The gap between the claim and the ledger

State claim from CDOT’s 2025 Colorado Aviation Economic Impact Study (data year 2023). Airport figures from the City’s 2026 Rates and Charges Study and 2026 Airport Leasing Document.
FigureAmountWhat it actually is
“Economic impact” of the airport$73.6MGross business revenues including multiplier effects — the same dollar counted again as it is re-spent. Not City income.
…of which “visitor spending”$28.9MBuilt on an assumed crowd of fly-in visitors. The City’s own fee model finds ~40 billed overnight stays a year.
Airport’s total annual revenue, 2025$1,059,930The whole enterprise — hangar rent, ground leases, fuel flowage, grants and miscellaneous income.
Total lease revenue, all 122 leases$597,370Hangar and ground rent. Its single largest line is a cell-tower ground lease.
Collected from the runway itself$0No landing fee, no touch-and-go fee, on 137,452 movements.

We are told the noise overhead is the sound of $73.6 million. The airport’s own books show $1.06 million of revenue and seven cents a flight from the flying itself.

The full breakdown of the $73.6 million →

Part three

What Longmont carries

The third-busiest field in the study, run by one and a half people

The Rates and Charges Study compared Vance Brand against seven Front Range airports. The table it produced — Exhibit E — is the most damning page in the file, and it appears to have been assembled for an entirely different purpose.

Rates and Charges Study, Exhibit E — Airport Comparison Chart (p. 67), data as of January 2026. Bars are scaled to Centennial. Exhibit E describes LMO as a “Top-5 CDOT GA airport… single-employee model, non-towered, intense community/political pressure.”

Of the four airports in the study running six figures of traffic, three have real staff. Centennial has 24 people. Rocky Mountain Metro has 25. Greeley-Weld has an airport authority. Longmont has one and a half positions — and the study notes the City’s road-and-bridge department does the plowing and mowing, meaning other departments absorb work the airport cannot staff.

And we do it on a fraction of the land. Vance Brand sits on 261 acres. Rocky Mountain Metro has 1,700. Centennial has 1,400. Northern Colorado has 1,065. LMO carries two-thirds of RMMA’s traffic on 15% of RMMA’s footprint — and unlike any of them, it is “bordered by dense residential development on three sides.”

“Vance Brand Airport is bordered by dense residential development on three sides (north, east, and south).”

— Noise Program Assessment Baseline Report (p. 5)

Where the traffic comes from

The busiest, best-staffed airport in the region sends its students here

Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport has three runways, a control tower, 1,700 acres, 25 staff, and four flight schools based on the field — the Rates and Charges Study lists them (p. 16). It charges no landing fee. Neither do we. So its students practice here, on our 4,799-foot strip, over our neighborhoods, and go home. The City’s noise consultant recorded the pattern in plain language:

“The dominant issue was repetitive touch-and-go operations, especially from aircraft perceived to originate from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport.”

— Noise Program Assessment Baseline Report (p. 26)

The arithmetic of who lives under it. Longmont’s population is 98,630. There are 340 aircraft based at Vance Brand — one for every 290 residents, about a third of one percent of the city. The remaining traffic is visitors. In 2025 the field ran 1.4 aircraft movements per Longmont resident, and complaints came from 94 separate households, up from 84 the year before.

We are not a hub. We are the overflow lot — and we are the only ones paying the parking attendant.

Part three, continued

And the airport is going broke anyway

Insolvent in 2028. “Critical” by 2030.

This is not a projection made by critics of the airport. It is the five-year budget the City’s own consultant built, from the City’s own Airport Fund statement. The Airport Fund — which the study notes “relies primarily on hangar rental fees” — opens 2026 with $515,720 in working capital. A single $1.01 million capital project consumes most of that cushion in year one. From there, costs outrun revenue every single year.

Rates and Charges Study, Working Capital Analysis (p. 35) and Budget Summary (p. 37). A net working-capital loss of roughly $743,000 over five years. Total available funds fall from about $1.91 million to about $654,000 — a 66% reduction.

The study’s own “Key Financial Indicators” table (p. 37). The status words are the study’s, not ours.
YearWorking capitalTotal available fundsStatus
2026$515,720~$1.91MPositive
2027Declining—Watch
2028(–$59,182)—Deficit
2029Deteriorating—Deficit
2030(–$227,446)~$654KCritical

“Without corrective action — including new revenue strategies, expense controls, or identify alternative funding — the fund’s long-term fiscal stability is at risk.”

— Rates and Charges Study, Budget Summary (p. 37)

This is not new

Five deficits in six years

The study’s 2020–2025 actuals (p. 36). Expenses exceeded revenue in five of six years. 2025 was the first year in the black — and the study explicitly declines to call it a recovery: the improvement “is not yet self-sustaining,” and the fund “requires deliberate fiscal intervention to reverse the projected decline and restore long-term solvency” (p. 38).

And the bills keep coming. Beyond the $1.01 million project already funded for 2026, the study identifies $926,700 in unfunded capital projects for the same year — and the capital improvement plan queues a $690,000 unleaded fuel tank transition in 2027, $652,000 in taxiway pavement, and a $725,000 airport master plan (pp. 37–38). Operating and maintenance costs grind up about 3% a year regardless, from $782,802 in 2026 to $881,051 by 2030.

More traffic across a runway that charges nothing does not fix this. It is this — more wear, more pavement, more cost, and not one additional dollar of revenue.

Part four

The promise Longmont already made

This is not optional. It is a federal obligation.

Every time Longmont accepted federal airport money, it signed the FAA’s grant assurances — 39 of them. Number 24 is the one that matters here, and the City’s own consultant says we are not meeting it.

Grant Assurance 24

requires the airport sponsor to “maintain a fee and rental structure that makes the airport as self-sustaining as possible under the circumstances at the airport.”

The study’s finding, twice: existing lease rates and escalation provisions “fall slightly below those observed at comparable airports and are insufficient to support long-term financial sustainability” (pp. 5, 8). It goes further — “lease rates that are significantly below market do not align with this federal requirement.”

Read that as a resident. The City has a standing federal commitment to charge enough that this airport pays for itself as far as it possibly can. It currently charges nothing for the runway, the lowest fuel flowage fee in its own comparison set, and tie-down rates near the bottom of the market. The question is not whether the City may charge. It is why it has chosen not to.

And the fee is squarely legal. The study lays out the framework: 49 U.S.C. §§ 47107 and 47133, FAA Order 5190.6C Ch. 18, and the FAA’s 2013 Policy Regarding Airport Rates and Charges. Landing fees “are allowed, but they must be justified, consistently administered, and tied to legitimate airport needs” (p. 32). City staff have already agreed to submit any proposal to the FAA for review.

The one line that must not be crossed. The study is explicit that a landing fee “cannot lawfully be used as a mechanism to suppress, deter, or selectively limit otherwise permissible aeronautical operations” (p. 33). That is real, and it matters. A fee sold as a way to reduce traffic is an illegal access restriction. The same fee, built up from documented airfield costs — runway and taxiway maintenance, lighting, pavement management, snow removal, insurance — and justified on self-sustainability and cost recovery, is exactly what the FAA’s own policy contemplates. Longmont should ask for the second one, and only the second one.

The honest risk, stated in the same study (p. 33): a tenant could file a Part 16 complaint, and “it could be likely that a lawsuit would be filed that the City would have to defend.” The study pointedly did not estimate the cost of that defense. That blank is the strongest card the opposition holds, and the City should fill it in before the debate rather than during it.

Part five

The fix the City already paid to have designed

$4.63 a landing

Here is what all of this comes down to for the person actually flying the airplane. The study’s recommended landing fee is $1.99 per 1,000 lb of landing weight — the very bottom of the market range it surveyed ($1.99–$3.00, average $2.45). The average visiting aircraft in the dominant weight band weighs 2,326 lb.

What a typical visiting trainer would pay to land at Vance Brand, at the study’s own recommended rate… $4.63 Per landing. Across all 42,049 visiting arrivals the average is $4.80. This is not a barrier to anyone. It is the price of a coffee.
…against what the City collects from that same aircraft’s entire visit today… $0.07 Everything the flying itself generates — fuel flowage plus ramp fees — per operation across the whole field. Seven cents in, wear on a 4,799-foot runway out.
Rates and Charges Study, Scenarios 1–3 (pp. 28–30), net of the 20% service charge retained by Vector Aviation’s “Plane Pass” collection program. Fee is per 1,000 lb of maximum landing weight.
Fee levelVisiting aircraft (net / yr)+ Based aircraftCombined total
$3.00 / 1,000 lb$243,292+$113,243$356,536
$2.00 / 1,000 lb$162,195+$75,496$237,690
$1.00 / 1,000 lb$81,097+$37,748$118,845
2030 ending working capital, with a $2 / 1,000‑lb landing fee +$936,389 against –$227,446 with no action — a swing of $1,163,835 (p. 35)
Everything else combined, yr 1+$63,234
The landing fee alone, yr 1+$162,195
Do nothing
–$227,446
insolvent — “Critical”
Rate increases only (~$63K/yr)
+$108,273
barely above zero
Rate increases + a $2 landing fee
+$936,389
healthy — can clear the backlog

Everything else the study recommends adds up to $63,234. Raising ground leases from $0.35 to $0.39 per square foot: $57,684. Raising the fuel flowage fee from 6¢ to 9¢: $4,150. Raising the overnight ramp fee from $40 to $75: $1,400. All of it together barely lifts the fund above zero by 2030. The landing fee alone raises $162,195 in the first year — about 2.5× the entire rest of the package.

Charge everyone the same rate. The FAA’s core test is that similarly situated users be charged on substantially comparable terms. A single weight-based rate applied to every aircraft — based or visiting, light or heavy — is the hardest possible structure to attack as arbitrary, and it raises about $237,690 a year. The only exemptions are the ones federal practice already grants: government and military aircraft (p. 27).

If the City builds it properly, it holds up. The study’s own checklist for a defensible fee (p. 33):

  • a written landing-fee policy
  • a documented cost-recovery methodology
  • tied to runway and taxiway upkeep and airfield lighting
  • …plus snow removal, pavement management, insurance
  • a defensible basis — maximum gross landing weight
  • consistent application across similar users
  • clearly justified exemptions
  • record-keeping and advance notice to users

Two documentation quirks worth knowing before a skeptic raises them. The Scenario 3 narrative says “$1.00 per landing” while its own table is computed per 1,000 lb (p. 30). And the Working Capital Analysis narrative gives the 2030 figure as $936,389 while the table on the same page shows $969,389 (p. 35). Both are internal inconsistencies in the study’s presentation, not in the underlying analysis. This page uses the more conservative narrative figure throughout.

Four dollars and sixty-three cents. That is the entire ask — and it is the difference between an airport the study calls “Critical” and one that can pay its own bills.

What to ask the City for

Five things, all of them already on the City’s desk

None of what follows requires a new study, a new consultant, or a fight with the FAA. Every item is a recommendation the City has already paid to receive.

The concrete ask
  1. Direct staff to prepare a landing-fee policy for FAA pre-review. Build the rate up from the airfield costs the Rates and Charges Study already lists, at the study’s own recommended $1.99 / 1,000 lb, applied to every aircraft on the same terms. Staff have already agreed to submit a proposal to the FAA; ask for a date.
  2. Adopt the non-landing-fee recommendations now. Ground lease to $0.39, fuel flowage from 6¢ to 9¢, tie-downs and ramp fees to market, flat annual escalators in place of CPI. That is $63,234 a year the City is currently choosing not to collect, and none of it needs federal review.
  3. Fund the operations analytics. The noise assessment’s central recommendation is operator-level flight tracking. That system is also the billing record a landing fee requires — and it produces the based-versus-visiting and touch-and-go counts nobody currently has. One line item, two problems solved.
  4. Fill in the blank the study left. Commission the legal-exposure estimate the Rates and Charges Study explicitly declined to make. Going into this debate without a number for the downside is how the proposal gets killed in the room.
  5. Adopt 2025 as the public baseline. 137,452 counted operations. Put it in the record so every future claim about this airport — growth, impact, revenue — is measured against a counted number instead of an estimate.

It is worth being precise about what this is not. It is not a proposal to close the airport, restrict flying, impose a curfew, or push anyone out. Those are federally preempted and they are not on the table. Nobody here is arguing that general aviation has no value.

The argument is narrower and much harder to answer: Longmont is giving away, for free, the one asset it owns that everyone wants — and it is doing so while its own consultant projects the airport fund insolvent in two years, while the City carries the field with one and a half staff on 261 acres ringed by houses, and while the flying itself returns seven cents a movement to the people who live underneath it.

Four dollars and sixty-three cents a landing. Charged to everyone, based and visiting alike. Justified on the federal obligation Longmont already signed. That is the whole ask, and the City’s own consultants wrote every word of the case for it.

Nothing on this page is a bill, a proposal, or a legal opinion. It is a close reading of three documents — two the City of Longmont commissioned and one published by the State — with every figure cited to the page it appears on. Where this page performs arithmetic on the studies’ numbers, the inputs are shown so the work can be checked.

Deep dive: the Rates and Charges Study → Deep dive: what the airport counted → Deep dive: the $73.6 million → Open the live runway-use ledger →

Sources & method

Show your work

Three documents underlie this page. (1) Rates and Charges Study, Vance Brand Airport (Bolton & Menk for the City of Longmont, 2026) — cited as “Rates Study.” (2) Noise Program Assessment — Baseline Report (Airport Monitoring Systems for the City of Longmont, 2026), with the Council Communication for Item 9.B dated July 28, 2026 — cited as “Noise Assessment.” (3) CDOT’s 2025 Colorado Aviation Economic Impact Study. Page numbers are each document’s own printed pagination. Arithmetic performed here is shown with its inputs.

  • Rates Study, p. 1 — stated purpose includes analyzing “the utility and financial implications of implementing landing fees on aircraft operating at the field.”
  • Rates Study, pp. 4–5, 8 — the aerospace/business-aviation rationale; FAA Grant Assurance 24; existing rates “insufficient to support long-term financial sustainability”; below-market rates “do not align with this federal requirement.” Longmont population ~98,630; median household income ~$90,000.
  • Rates Study, p. 9 — “Personal/recreational use accounted for 67% of GA flight hours per FAA survey.”
  • Rates Study, pp. 12–13 — LMO profile: 261 acres; Runway 11/29 at 4,799 ft × 75 ft; 30,000 lb single-wheel capacity; 313 hangars in 80 buildings; 340 based aircraft (84% single-engine); box and T-hangar $0.94/sq ft; ground lease $0.35/sq ft; fuel flowage $0.06; tie-down $40–$45; Landing Fee: NA.
  • Rates Study, pp. 16, 19 — Rocky Mountain Metro: three runways, 1,700 acres, two FBOs, four flight schools, 400 based aircraft, 192,000 annual operations.
  • Rates Study, p. 25 — the FBO sold approximately 135,597 gallons in 2025, equating to revenue of $8,135.82; the airport spends approximately $20,000 annually mowing grass.
  • Rates Study, p. 27 — landing-fee scenarios modeled with and without based aircraft; government and military aircraft typically exempt; data provided by Vector Aviation, whose Plane Pass program retains 20% as a service charge.
  • Rates Study, p. 28 (Scenario 1 table) — the arrival-by-weight count used throughout Part One. Non-based, non-government, non-military: 42,049 arrivals, total maximum landing weight 101,371,834 lb. By band: ≤2,000 lb 2,382; 2,000–3,000 lb 37,337; 3,000–4,000 lb 1,874; 4,000–12,500 lb 409 combined; over 12,500 lb 47 combined. Based-aircraft arrivals: 12,728. Shares and averages on this page are computed from those figures.
  • Rates Study, pp. 28–30 — landing-fee scenarios at $3 / $2 / $1 per 1,000 lb, net of the 20% collection charge, with and without based aircraft.
  • Rates Study, p. 31 — recommended fee table: landing fee $1.99 per 1,000 lb “if implemented” against a surveyed range of $1.99–$3.00 (average $2.45); ground lease $0.39; fuel flowage $0.09; tie-down $75–$100.
  • Rates Study, pp. 32–33 — the FAA framework (49 U.S.C. §§ 47107, 47133; FAA Order 5190.6C Ch. 18; 78 Fed. Reg. 55330); City staff agreed to submit any proposal to the FAA; fees “cannot lawfully be used as a mechanism to suppress, deter, or selectively limit” operations; the defensible-fee checklist; the Part 16 and lawsuit warning, with the cost of defense expressly not estimated.
  • Rates Study, pp. 34–36 — Budget Pro Forma and Working Capital Analysis: working capital $515,720 (2026) declining to (–$227,446) by 2030; the $1.01M TRP012 project; O&M rising from $782,802 to $881,051; the $63,234 year-one non-landing-fee revenue impact broken into $57,684 ground lease + $4,150 fuel flowage + $1,400 overnight ramp; 2020–2025 revenue and expense actuals.
  • Rates Study, pp. 37–38 — Budget Summary and Key Financial Indicators (Positive → Watch → Deficit → Critical); ~$743,000 net working-capital loss; ~66% drop in total available funds; $926,700 unfunded 2026 capital projects; the capital plan’s $690,000 unleaded fuel transition, $652,000 taxiway pavement, and $725,000 master plan; “not yet self-sustaining”; “requires deliberate fiscal intervention.”
  • Rates Study, p. 39 — fewer than 20% of general-aviation airports operate in the black.
  • Rates Study, Exhibit D, p. 66 — comparable lease and fee information, including fuel flowage at Boulder ($0.10), RMMA ($0.10–$0.18), Northern Colorado ($0.06–$0.08) and San Luis Valley ($0.10) against LMO’s $0.06.
  • Rates Study, Exhibit E, p. 67 — Airport Comparison Chart (data as of January 2026): Centennial 314,071 ops / 24 FTE / 1,400 acres; RMMA 191,533 / 25 FTE / 1,700 acres; KLMO 126,600 / 1.5 FTE / 261 acres, non-towered, described as a “Top-5 CDOT GA airport… single-employee model… intense community/political pressure”; KFNL 109,294 / 4+ FTE / 1,065 acres; Greeley-Weld 110,000–120,000 / 11–50 staff / 1,198 acres; Erie 88,457 / part-time manager / 115 acres; Boulder 69,000 / 3.0 FTE / 136 acres.
  • Noise Assessment, pp. 5–7 — airport “bordered by dense residential development on three sides”; FAA non-towered operations data “not considered reliable enough for this project”; the Mode C Veil ADS-B basis; platform online Q4 2023; annual operations 126,607 (2024) → 137,452 (2025).
  • Noise Assessment, pp. 8–12 — approximately 40% local operations (defined as departing LMO and returning within 75 minutes); operations by day of week; the 88%/12% time-of-day split; operations by aircraft category (single engine 116,716 → 125,666; multi engine 8,488 → 9,395); Cessna 172 and Piper PA-28 as the most common types; Mile High Skydiving monthly operations summing to 4,479 (2024) and 3,945 (2025); Runway 29 at approximately 65% of use, consistent with prevailing wind.
  • Noise Assessment, pp. 17, 26 — complaint households rising from 84 to 94; “repetitive touch-and-go operations, especially from aircraft perceived to originate from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport.”
  • Council Communication, Item 9.B, July 28, 2026 — presentation only; recommended action and fiscal impact both “N/A”; “Some recommendations from the VNAP will require Council direction and additional funding to move forward”; the recommendation to expand flight tracking and operations analytics to measure conformance by operator, flight school, and flying club.
  • CDOT, 2025 Colorado Aviation Economic Impact Study — Vance Brand individual report (data year 2023): $73.6M business revenues, of which $44.7M on-airport and $28.9M visitor spending; 448 jobs. The study defines “business revenues” as gross output including multiplier effects.
  • City of Longmont, 2026 Airport Leasing Document — 122 hangar and ground leases totaling $597,370 in current annual rent; the largest single lease is a cell-tower ground lease. Documented in full on the economic-impact page.
  • The Lost Landing ledger — the stop rate is this project’s own live measurement from public ADS-B events near KLMO, where a “stop” is a landing paired with a later departure at least 20 minutes apart. It moves with the rolling 30-day window — it has run between roughly 2.7% and 4% of runway uses; the current value is shown live on the ledger. It is a floor, not an estimate: aircraft without ADS-B are invisible to it.