Longmont, Colorado • Vance Brand Municipal Airport (KLMO)
What the $70 Million Really Counts We were told the airport pours $73.6 million a year into Longmont. Strip the bad assumptions and almost none of it survives contact with the data.
The number gets repeated every time the runway's free ride comes up — and it is inflated end to end. It counts a skydiving company's gross ticket sales. It counts every dollar a second time through a “multiplier.” And its single biggest piece — $28.9 million in “visitor spending” — rests on a phantom crowd of 22,000 fly-in visitors the runway does not carry. Take the assumptions out and the real, runway-dependent benefit is a rounding error. Here is the arithmetic, line by line, against what the runway actually does — counted, not estimated.
Every count is a floor, never an estimate
What we're told
$73.6M a year
gross “business revenues” — a drop zone's receipts, counted twice by a multiplier
What actually stops
2.7%
of runway uses is a real visit; the rest never comes to town — counted, live
What the runway is charged
$0
no landing fee, no runway fee — on any of it
The claim
“$73.6 million a year”
From the Colorado Department of Transportation's 2025 Colorado Aviation Economic Impact Study (data year 2023). The airport's individual report card gives Vance Brand these totals.
$73.6M
total business revenues — the number you hear quoted
$44.7M
on-airport activity (admin, capital projects, tenant sales)
$28.9M
visitor spending — people arriving by air and spending in town
448
jobs • $29.6M payroll • $46.0M value added
The study's own definition of “business revenues”: “Total expenditures for airport administration, capital projects and tenant sales of goods and services, as well as visitor spending … also referred to as output, sales, or economic activity.” It also includes “multiplier effects” — the same dollar re-counted as it is re-spent. It is a gross top-line, not a surplus, not a benefit, and not money the City can collect.
The number isn't stable, and the yardstick keeps changing. The same study has put Vance Brand at three very different figures under three different definitions — so “$73.6 million” is a snapshot of a method, not a measured constant.
| Study | Headline for LMO | What it measured | Anchor figures |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | $27.7M | “output” | 204 jobs; 22,000 air visitors/yr assumed |
| 2020 | $68.0M | “business revenues” | 490 jobs; 72,939 operations (2018); 274 based aircraft |
| 2025 | $73.6M | “business revenues” | 448 jobs; $44.7M on-airport + $28.9M visitor |
The $44.7 million on-airport half
The busiest business on the field grosses about a fifth of it
The larger half of the headline is “on-airport activity” — airport administration, capital projects, and tenant sales. The dominant tenant is Mile-Hi Skydiving, which the State's own factsheet calls one of the busiest drop zones in the country, at roughly 40,000 jumps a year. Price those jumps at Mile-Hi's own published rates and the arithmetic doesn't come close.
Tandem $239
Tandem + video up to $437
AFF student $199–329
Licensed “fun jump” lift ticket $33
Gear rental $25
If every one of the 40,000 jumps were a basic $239 tandem (impossible — most aren't)$9.6M
Absolute ceiling — all 40,000 as tandems with every add-on ($437)$17.5M
Reality: most jumps are licensed jumpers buying a $33 lift ticket and going up again — realistic gross~$6–10M
The State's on-airport figure for the whole field$44.7M
A busy drop zone's jump count is not its customer count. The 40,000 jumps are mostly repeat jumps by licensed skydivers paying a $33 lift ticket — many per day, all summer. Tandems and students (the $200–400 tickets) are a minority of the count. So even the field's flagship business grosses well under a quarter of the $44.7 million, and that is gross revenue of a recreation business whose customers drive in.
Where does the rest of the $44.7 million come from? Every other tenant, plus airport admin and capital projects — all counted at gross sales — and multiplier effects, the same dollar counted again as it is re-spent. In CDOT's own 2013 study the multiplier pushed the direct on-airport figure of $11.6 million up to $19.7 million. Strip the re-counting and the “real” number is far smaller.
None of it depends on the runway being free. Skydiving customers arrive by car; the lift planes are based here already. Counting a drop zone's gross ticket sales as a reason not to charge for the runway is a category error.
The $28.9 million visitor half live figures
It assumes a crowd that never lands
The visitor-spending half is the only part premised on the runway: people flying in and spending on lodging, food, and transport. The 2013 study put that at 22,000 air visitors a year. At two people per light aircraft, that needs on the order of ten thousand fly-in-and-stay arrivals. Here is how the study got its crowd — and what the runway actually carries.
How the study built the crowd — from the airport's own 2012 master plan (Table 8-3)
18,535est. operations
assume× ½
9,268arrive
assume× 30%
2,780bring visitors
assume× 3
8,341“visitors”
assume× $125
$1.04Mclaimed
Every arrow is the word “assumed.” Not one step is counted — then add 5,455 skydiving customers (who drive in) at $110 each. The ledger throws the whole chain out and counts what actually lands. ↓
9,640
every arrival at the runway
training
nobody comes to town
1,283
only 13% of “uses”
44%
coverage — the rest, dwell unknown
2.7%
of all runway uses
Across the full history we've counted, about 100 distinct aircraft stopped at all — only 40 of which even resolve to a registered N‑number — and the median stay was ~17 hours, so many are based or overnight aircraft, not transient visitors. The genuinely transient band (20 min–6 h) is just 103 visits by 37 aircraft, about 1,100 a year.
Both sides of this are floors. Aircraft without ADS-B are invisible, and 56% of landings had no visible departure, so the true stop count is somewhat higher. But it is nowhere near the tens of thousands of fly-in visitors the dollar figure needs — because the visitor count was inferred from a raw operations estimate that is mostly training and skydiving lift.
If the $28.9M in visitor spending is spread over every real stop the runway actually sees…
$10,505
per stop, per year (~2,750 real stops/yr). A fuel top-off and a sandwich do not clear five figures.
…and over just the transient visits — the ones that plausibly bring new money to town…
$26,417
per visit (~1,100/yr). No general-aviation drop-in injects $26,000 into Longmont.
Price the real transient traffic at a generous $100–$500 a visit and the honest visitor benefit is a few hundred thousand dollars a year — on the order of 1–4% of the $28.9 million claimed.
Even if we grant every dollar
What Longmont actually banks in tax
“Business revenues” is not city revenue. The City's cut is sales tax on the taxable retail slice — chiefly visitor spending on lodging, food, and retail. Longmont's city sales-tax rate is 3.53% (lodging adds another 2%). Apply it to the study's number, then to the runway traffic that actually lands.
City tax (3.53%) on the study's $28.9M visitor spending — the inflated figure~$1.0M/yr
City tax (3.53%) on the real transient visitor spending (~1,100 visits × $100–500)~$4K–19K/yr
What the runway itself collects for any of it today$0
A $10 fair-use runway fee on ~102,000 projected runway uses/yr~$1.0M/yr
A single fair-use runway fee would raise about as much as the City's entire sales-tax take from the study's inflated visitor claim — and roughly 50 to 250 times the tax from the visitors who actually land.
The study's own tax line was $891,000 in 2013 — and that is local and state taxes combined, from the whole airport operation; the City's slice is a fraction of it. Meanwhile Longmont accepted $725,000 in federal airport money this year and charges nothing for the runway. The runway is the one lever the City isn't pulling.
The airport's own books
What the field actually collects: $597,370
Set the economic-impact abstraction aside and open the ledger the City actually keeps. Its 2026 airport leasing document — every hangar and ground lease at the field — adds up to $597,370 a year. That is the airport's entire revenue. It is eight-tenths of one percent of the $73.6 million the airport cites for itself — and not one cent of it comes from the runway.
“The true financial benefits to communities are in the form of economic output … rather than revenues generated by the airport operation itself.”
— Vance Brand Airport Master Plan, 2012 (§ 7.1)
The airport's own plan says the quiet part out loud: the headline is economic output, not the airport's money. That money was $427,375 in 2010 — and there was no landing fee then either. Today it is $597,370. The runway's share has never changed.
$597,370
the airport's entire annual lease revenue — all 122 leases, 2026
0.8%
of the $73.6M “economic impact” it cites for itself
$102,685
its single biggest tenant — a cell tower (17% of all revenue)
$0
the runway's share — every dollar is hangar or ground rent
The airport's #1 revenue source is a T-Mobile cell tower. Its ground lease ($102,685) is more than five times what the entire Mile-Hi skydiving operation pays the City in rent ($19,566). The “aviation economic engine” collects most of its actual money from hangar rent and a cell tower on airport land.
A single fair-use runway fee would nearly double it. At $10 per runway use the ledger projects about $1.0M a year — roughly 1.7× the airport's entire lease portfolio, from the traffic that pays nothing today.
Strip the $73.6 million down to the money that actually changes hands and the field runs on $597,370 a year — hangar rent and a cell tower — while the runway itself, the whole point of the “economic engine” argument, brings in nothing.
Source: City of Longmont 2026 Airport Leasing Document (master billing spreadsheet; 122 leases; lessee addresses omitted).
What the runway actually does
Training and skydiving lift — and it pays nothing
Of every runway use we count, roughly seven in ten are low approaches and another quarter are touch-and-goes — practice laps and instrument runs that never bring a passenger into Longmont. Add the based skydiving fleet climbing for lift after lift, and the overwhelming majority of runway activity is aircraft that were already here or never stopped at all.
That is the whole point. The City signed a federal promise to keep a fee structure that makes the airport “as self-sustaining as possible … taking into account the volume of traffic.” The volume of traffic is enormous. The fee is zero. And the $73.6 million headline — a drop zone's gross ticket sales plus an inflated visitor estimate, both run through a multiplier — is doing the work of hiding that.
None of this says the airport is worthless. It says the $73.6 million is gross business revenue — mostly a drive-in recreation business plus a visitor figure the real arrival data cannot support — and it is not a reason the runway itself should be free. Those are two different claims, and only the ledger's is measured.
Who made this number — and who it's for
A number built to be big, by people who benefit when it is
A figure this far from the airport's own books doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from a specific chain — a state agency, its consultants, and an industry coalition — and at every link, someone has a reason to make it large. None of this requires anyone to lie. The incentives do the work.
Who publishes it
CDOT's Division of Aeronautics. It is funded entirely by aviation
fuel taxes (about $53 million a year, none from the state general fund), and its core job is handing
that money back out as airport grants. A large “economic impact” number is the justification for
the grant program that is the Division's reason to exist — and Vance Brand is a grant recipient. The
scorekeeper is paid by the sport.
Who writes it
Outside consultants. The 2020 edition was authored by EBP US (an
economics firm whose product is impact studies) with Kimley-Horn; the 2013 edition
added Jviation (now part of Woolpert). Kimley-Horn and Woolpert describe
themselves as airport engineering and planning firms — they are paid to design the
airport capital projects that “economic impact” figures are routinely used to justify. The 2025
author isn't named on any public-facing page.
Who amplifies it
The “Alliance for Aviation Across America” republishes CDOT's
figure. It is a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit administered by an outside firm (Hass & Company LLC);
its listed president also heads NBAA, the business-aviation lobby, and its charter members
are the aviation trade associations (AOPA, EAA, GAMA, NBAA, NATA). From there the number travels to the
Governor's office, the airport board, and local op-eds — each time stripped of the study's own words:
gross business revenues.
Everyone who touches the number profits when it persuades. That is not a conspiracy — it is a set of aligned incentives producing exactly the figure those incentives reward.
The conclusions that get repeated
Said often enough to become common knowledge
- “The airport generates $73.6 million a year.” Repeated as civic fact — without the study's own qualifier that this is gross revenue (a drop zone's ticket sales among it), padded by a multiplier that counts each dollar twice.
- “About 120,000 operations a year.” An FAA Form 5010 planning estimate, repeated as if it were a count of real traffic.
- “The airport brings visitors who spend money in town.” Built on an assumed crowd of roughly 22,000 fly-in visitors — a number the runway's real arrivals (about one to three thousand stops a year) cannot support.
What it's done to the community
A town arguing from a number that isn't real
Longmont residents — and the council that represents them — now carry a badly skewed picture: an airport they have been told is a $73.6 million economic engine, when the airport's own 2026 books show $597,370 in total lease revenue and $0 from the runway itself.
That gap isn't harmless. The inflated figure is the argument used to keep the runway free, to justify accepting federal grants and the matching local dollars, and to wave off the City's own federal promise to make the airport “as self-sustaining as possible.” The people who live under the traffic are told the noise overhead is the sound of $73.6 million. This page — and the ledger it belongs to — exists to show them what actually lands.
Sources & method
Show your work
The claim figures are quoted from CDOT's published reports; the skydiving prices from Mile-Hi's own pricing page. The reality figures are produced by the same code that runs the public ledger, from public ADS-B events near KLMO. Headline funnel numbers refresh from the live ledger API; the unique-aircraft and per-visit breakdown was computed over the full observed history (about 34 days, as of July 2026). “Stopped” means a landing paired with a later departure at least 20 minutes apart — a judgment call this project makes and labels, not an industry standard.
- CDOT, 2025 Colorado Aviation Economic Impact Study — Vance Brand (LMO) individual report (data year 2023): $73.6M business revenues, $44.7M on-airport, $28.9M visitor spending, 448 jobs.
- CDOT, 2020 Colorado Aviation System Plan & Economic Impact Study — LMO factsheet: $68.0M; 72,939 operations (2018); 274 based aircraft; “~40,000 jumps” at Mile-Hi (2017).
- CDOT, 2013 Colorado Airports Economic Impact Study — Vance Brand: $27.7M output; 204 jobs; ~22,000 air visitors/yr; on-airport direct $11.6M / with multiplier $19.7M.
- Mile-Hi Skydiving published pricing: tandem $239 (to $437 with video); AFF $199–329; licensed fun-jump lift ticket $33; gear $25.
- City of Longmont, 2026 Airport Leasing Document (master billing spreadsheet) — 122 hangar and ground leases totaling $597,370 current annual rent; largest single lease is the T-Mobile West Tower ground lease at $102,685/yr; Mile-Hi Skydiving leases total $19,566/yr. Lessee addresses omitted.
- Vance Brand Municipal Airport Master Plan (FINAL 03/14/2012; economic analysis by KRAMER aerotek / Wilbur Smith Associates). Table 7-1: 2010 airport revenue $354,466 / 2009 $427,375, no landing fee. Table 8-3: GA visitor spending built as 18,535 est. itinerant ops × ½ × 30% × 3 visitors × $125. Table 8-9: 2010 total economic output $21.9M (RIMS II multiplier 2.2× direct-to-total). §7.1: benefits are “economic output … rather than revenues generated by the airport operation itself.”
- City of Longmont, Vance Brand Voluntary Noise Program Assessment — community project briefing, May 7, 2026: ~8% growth in total operations; top community concerns are touch-and-goes, skydiving, and low/late flights; program is “voluntary” because ANCA and FAA Grant Assurance 22 bar new noise/access restrictions at AIP-funded airports.
- Study authorship (from the report credits): 2013 — ICF SH&E, Jviation, EDR Group, KRAMER aerotek; 2020 — EBP US (formerly EDR Group), Kimley-Horn, KRAMER aerotek, MSU Denver. 2025 author not disclosed on public-facing pages.
- CDOT Division of Aeronautics funding: funded by aviation fuel taxes (~$53M/yr, no state general-fund reliance), redistributed as airport formula and discretionary grants — codot.gov/programs/aeronautics/fianancialinfo.
- Kimley-Horn and Woolpert (which acquired Jviation, 2020) market airport engineering and planning services — kimley-horn.com and woolpert.com.
- Alliance for Aviation Across America — 501(c)(4), administered c/o Hass & Company LLC; charter members AOPA, EAA, GAMA, NBAA, NATA (per its own site and the organization's IRS filing via ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer).
- Methodology critique of economic-impact studies (gross vs. net, multiplier overstatement, excluded counterfactual, substitution effects) — e.g. National Academies / TRB literature on airport economic-impact methods.