What the Airport Counted — The Lost Landing (KLMO)

The count

For the first time, these are counts — not estimates

This is the part of the report that matters most and will get the least attention on Tuesday. Vance Brand is non-towered, so its operations have always been a planning estimate. The consultant threw that estimate out and counted instead — 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)

What replaced it: because LMO sits inside Denver’s Mode C Veil, nearly every aircraft operating there is required to carry operable ADS-B Out equipment. AMS receives and processes those position reports directly. The platform came online in Q4 2023; 2024 is the first complete year of data. That is the entire basis of the report — and it is the same public ADS-B signal this ledger has been counting from the ground.

Source Relative scale Operations / yr

CDOT 2020 studyestimate · data year 2018 72,939

FAA Form 5010planning estimate · quoted for years ~120,000

Rates & Charges StudyExhibit E · the fee model’s input ~126,600

AMS counted, 2024ADS-B · first full year 126,607

AMS counted, 2025ADS-B · the current number 137,452

Counted figures from the Noise Program Assessment Baseline Report, p. 7. The CDOT and Form 5010 figures are the estimates this ledger has documented elsewhere; the ~126,600 is the operations input behind the City’s 2026 Rates and Charges Study (Exhibit E, p. 67) — which lands within seven flights of the counted 2024 total. Two City consultants, one year apart, the same number.

The airport’s traffic volume is no longer a matter of opinion. It is a measured quantity — and a measured quantity can be billed.

What the count is made of

A training field, on the data

Volume alone is only half the story. The composition is what determines who a fee would fall on — and the composition is unambiguous.

91% of 2025 operations were single-engine fixed-wing — 125,666 of 137,452 (pp. 10–11)

~40% are local operations — roughly 55,000 pattern flights a year (pp. 8–9)

C172
PA-28 the most common aircraft on the field — both are flight-training standards (p. 11)

~3% Mile High Skydiving’s share of annual operations — 3,945 flights in 2025 (p. 11)

Operations by aircraft category, from the report’s Figure 10 (p. 11). Category totals sum to within four flights of the reported annual totals.
Category	2024	2025	Change	Share of 2025
Fixed wing, single engine	116,716	125,666	+8,950	91.4%
Fixed wing, multi engine	8,488	9,395	+907	6.8%
Rotorcraft	312	825	+513	0.6%
Glider	423	547	+124	0.4%
Data unavailable	480	670	+190	0.5%
Other	188	345	+157	0.3%

Mid-week is the peak — a training signature, not a recreation one. The busiest days in 2025 were Wednesday (16.8%) and Thursday (16.4%); the quietest were Sunday (12.4%) and Saturday (12.6%) (p. 9). A field dominated by weekend recreational flying looks like the opposite. This one looks like a business operating on a schedule.

Runway 29 takes about 65% of it, with Runway 11 taking 35% — a split the report says is “consistent with the wind direction and frequency” for 2024–2025 (p. 12). Aircraft land into the wind. For fee-design purposes what matters is that the report now knows the split, by runway, by hour, by aircraft.

Nine in ten movements at Vance Brand are a single-engine trainer. Whatever else the airport is, on the data it is a flight school’s runway.

Where the growth came from

The airport grew by 10,845 flights. Skydiving shrank.

This is the single most useful thing in the report for anyone arguing about the airport’s finances, because it settles who the added traffic belongs to. Break the 2024–2025 change into its parts and the answer is not ambiguous.

+8,950 Single-engine fixed wing

82.5% of all growth came from one category — the Cessna 172 / Piper PA-28 class the report identifies as the field’s most common aircraft, and the standard equipment of flight training.

+907 Multi-engine fixed wing

Up 10.7% year on year — the fastest-growing fixed-wing category in percentage terms. The report names the Beech 76 among the most common multis; it is also a training aircraft.

−534 Mile High Skydiving

Skydiving operations fell 11.9%, from 4,479 flights in 2024 to 3,945 in 2025, while the field overall grew 8.6%. Whatever is driving the increase, it is not the drop zone.

Category figures are the report’s Figure 10 (p. 11). The skydiving totals are the sum of the monthly values in Figure 12 (p. 12): 4,479 operations in 2024 and 3,945 in 2025 — consistent with the report’s statement that Mile High accounts for “about 3% of annual operations.”

The growth is imported, by the report’s own account. The report classifies an operation as local only when the aircraft takes off from LMO and returns within 75 minutes (p. 8). An aircraft that departs another field, works the pattern at Vance Brand, and flies home is itinerant — and the report records that the dominant community-reported issue is “repetitive touch-and-go operations, especially from aircraft perceived to originate from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport” (p. 26).

Which is precisely the fee-relevant slice. Transient, non-based aircraft are the category every landing-fee model treats separately — and the category Longmont’s own hangar tenants are not in. The count now gives that slice a size for the first time: roughly 82,000 itinerant operations a year at the report’s ~60% figure.

One caution before anyone builds a revenue model on that 82,000: “itinerant” is defined by the 75-minute rule, not by where the aircraft is based, and an operation is not the same as a landing. The report does not publish a based-versus-visiting split, and it does not publish a touch-and-go count. Those are exactly the two figures the recommended conformance analytics would produce — and exactly why funding them matters.

What the count does to the fee math

The City’s fee study was built on last year’s traffic

Here is where the two City documents collide productively. The 2026 Rates and Charges Study priced three landing-fee scenarios against an operations base of about 126,600 — effectively the 2024 figure. The noise report’s counted 2025 total is 137,452. Every revenue projection in the fee study is therefore sized to a field that no longer exists.

Rates Study, $2 / 1,000 lb, transient aircraft only, net of the 20% collection charge (pp. 28–29)$162,195

The same scenario scaled to counted 2025 volume (× 137,452 / 126,607)~$176,100

Rates Study combined total — transient plus based aircraft$237,690

Combined, scaled to counted 2025 volume~$258,000

This is a straight linear rescale, shown to size the gap — not a re-run of the study’s model. The study’s scenarios also depend on aircraft weight mix and the share of operations that are billable landings, neither of which scales cleanly with total volume. The honest claim is directional, and it is enough: the fee study understates its own revenue because it was written before the count existed.

And the deficit it was written to solve has not moved. The same study projects the Airport Fund’s working capital turning negative in 2028 and reaching a status the study itself labels “Critical” by 2030. Its own conclusion: the fund “requires deliberate fiscal intervention to reverse the projected decline and restore long-term solvency.” More traffic across a runway that charges nothing does not improve that. It is the problem in a sentence.

Read the fiscal case in full →

The funding gap on Tuesday’s agenda

A report full of recommendations, arriving with no money

Item 9.B is a presentation. The Council Communication is explicit: recommended action “N/A,” fiscal impact “N/A.” And in the same document, three lines earlier:

Item 9.B

Type of item General Business

Recommended action N/A

Fiscal impact N/A

“This is a presentation only. Some recommendations from the VNAP will require Council direction and additional funding to move forward.”
— City Council Communication, Item 9.B, July 28, 2026

What the recommendations actually cost money to do

Expand flight tracking and operations analytics to measure conformance by operator, flight school, and flying club.
Launch a public dashboard showing trends over time.
Set measurable targets against the 2025 baseline.
Build structured complaint tracking with a resident feedback loop, and publish recurring transparency reports.
Evaluate dedicated staffing or contracted support to administer the program.

What is attached to pay for any of it

Nothing. Fiscal impact: N/A.
No recommended action, so no vote to authorize spending.
The Airport Fund that would carry the cost is the same fund the City’s other consultant projects insolvent by 2028.

The concrete ask — all of it is a funding ask

Fund the analytics. Direct staff to return with a costed proposal for the operator-level conformance and operations analytics the report recommends — the same system that produces the based-versus-transient and touch-and-go counts nobody currently has.
Adopt 2025 as the baseline. 137,452 counted operations is the measurement floor. Put it in the record so every future year is compared against a counted number rather than an estimate.
Fund the collection side too. The Rates and Charges Study prices the revenue lever; the noise report supplies the traffic data it needs. Ask that the two be costed together, not in separate budget cycles.
Put a date on it. A report-back date, with the analytics scope and price attached. Without one, “will require additional funding” becomes another year of estimates.

The City just paid to learn exactly how much traffic crosses its runway. The next question is the only one that follows: what is that traffic worth, and who is paying for it now?

The report’s own landing-fee section

Two pages on fees, and they argue against

The noise report contains a Landing-Fees subsection (pp. 20–21). It records the local perception that Vance Brand carries more traffic because it charges light general aviation nothing to land — and then, carefully, pushes back on it. Know the argument before it is made at you.

Noise Program Assessment Baseline Report, “Landing-Fees” (pp. 20–21).
What the report says	What it actually establishes
Most Colorado airports charge landing fees only at or above 12,500 lb maximum landing weight.	True, and a reason to build LMO’s rate on documented airfield cost recovery rather than on regional precedent.
Light GA aircraft — “over 90% of the operations at Vance Brand” — weigh under 3,000 lb.	The report confirming, in the fee section, that nine-tenths of the traffic is exactly the class that currently pays nothing.
Only four Colorado airports charge light-GA landing fees — Denver, Aspen, Gunnison–Crested Butte, Telluride — all commercial service airports, “differentiating them significantly from the operational model of Vance Brand.”	The sentence that will be quoted at Council. It is also the report framing a revenue question it was not commissioned to answer — the City has a separate, dedicated study for that.

The comparison it does not make. A commercial-service airport has airline landing fees, passenger facility charges, concessions, and parking. Vance Brand has hangar rent and a ground lease on a cell tower. The four Colorado airports charging light-GA fees are not more dependent on that revenue than LMO — they are far less. Being unlike them is an argument for a fee, not against one.

What residents volunteered, unprompted

Funding was the most common self-generated proposal

“It seems like operating a money losing operation like the airport would benefit from landing fees. Lots of airports do it.”
Survey open comment — p. 72

“Why does the Longmont area have to bear the burden of so many flight schools operating here, particularly when they don’t pay a penny to use the facilities. At the very least, they should be paying landing fees.”
Survey open comment — p. 67

“We need to install touch-and-go fees (and landing fees, and higher hangar rentals) … to pay for itself. Citizens should not have to subsidize activities that disrupt our daily lives.”
Survey open comment — p. 67

“Taxpayers … contribute nearly $400,000 annually to airport operations … the lack of appropriate landing fees are inadequate to cover the impact and need to be instituted at the earliest possible opportunity.”
Survey open comment — p. 73

And the opposing comment, which is the more useful one. A respondent opposed to fees set out the exact trap that sinks them: “There are only two possible purposes for landing fees: 1) Make the fees so high that airport activity is decreased … 2) Add another juicy revenue source for the City while not solving the issue at hand” (p. 72). The first half of that is a real legal risk and the second half is not — because cost recovery at a fund the City’s consultant projects insolvent is not “juicy revenue,” it is Grant Assurance 24.

The line that matters. A fee engineered to deter or selectively limit aeronautical activity is an unlawful access restriction at a federally obligated airport. A fee built up from documented airfield costs — runway and taxiway upkeep, lighting, snow removal, pavement management, insurance — and justified on self-sustainability and cost recovery is the ordinary practice the FAA’s own rates and charges policy contemplates. Same fee. Only one version survives a challenge. Keep the counted operations data where it belongs: as the measurement basis for the rate, never as an argument that the point is less traffic.

The part nobody has said out loud

The measurement system and the metering system are the same system

The report’s central recommendation is to fund expanded flight tracking and operations analytics so the airport can measure conformance “by operator, flight school, and flying club.” Read that as a finance officer would. Identifying which operator flew which movement at what time is not only how you measure a noise program. It is how you bill for a runway.

One investment, two returns One system the ADS-B operations platform the report asks Council to fund is also the operator-level record a landing fee requires

Return oneConformance

Return twoCost recovery

Counted operations, by operator and hour

have it

2024–2025, ADS-B

Based vs. transient split, touch-and-go counts

missing

the recommended expansion

A defensible, auditable billing record

follows

same data, same platform

This is the strongest version of the funding argument. Council is not being asked to buy a noise report’s wishlist. It is being asked to fund the only piece of infrastructure that both closes the accountability gap the report identifies and supplies the operator-level records the City’s separate Rates and Charges Study says a defensible fee needs — written policy, documented methodology, consistent application across similar users, and record-keeping. One line item. Two problems.

The City has spent two consultancies establishing that it cannot measure its airport and cannot fund it. Both answers turn out to be the same purchase.

What it adds up to

The count is the asset

Strip the assessment down to what it changed and one thing survives: Vance Brand’s traffic is now a counted number rather than an FAA planning estimate. 137,452 operations in 2025, up 8.6% in a year, 91% of them single-engine trainers, with more than four-fifths of the growth in that one category and skydiving actually declining. That is not a noise finding. It is an asset-utilization finding, and it belongs in a budget conversation.

Against it sits the other half of the City’s own record: an Airport Fund its consultant projects negative by 2028 and “Critical” by 2030, total lease revenue of $597,370 a year, and $0 collected from the runway that carried all 137,452 movements. The fee study that priced the fix was built on 126,600 operations — the traffic level of the year before.

So the ask on Tuesday is a funding ask, and it is small: cost the analytics, adopt the counted 2025 figure as the baseline, and require that the measurement build and the rate structure be scoped together rather than in separate budget cycles. The City has already paid to find out what crosses its runway. It has not yet decided to find out what that is worth.

None of this is a proposal or a legal opinion. It is a close reading of two City documents — the AMS Noise Program Assessment Baseline Report and the Council Communication for Item 9.B, July 28, 2026 — with the fiscal figures drawn from the City’s 2026 Rates and Charges Study as cited on the companion page.

Start here: the whole file → The airport is in financial trouble → What the “$73.6 million” really counts → Open the live runway-use ledger →

Sources & method

Show your work

Operations figures and quotations are from the Noise Program Assessment — Baseline Report (Airport Monitoring Systems, prepared for the City of Longmont, 2026) and the City Council Communication for Item 9.B, meeting date July 28, 2026. Page numbers are the report’s own printed pagination, which runs two behind the PDF page count. Fiscal figures are from the City’s 2026 Rates and Charges Study (Bolton & Menk) and are documented on the companion page. Arithmetic performed here — category shares, growth composition, skydiving totals, and the rescaled fee scenarios — is stated with its inputs so it can be checked.

FAA operations data for non-towered airports “is based on estimates and is not considered reliable enough for this project”; Mode C Veil ADS-B requirement; AMS platform online Q4 2023, first full year 2024 — report pp. 6–7.
Annual operations 126,607 (2024) → 137,452 (2025), an increase of approximately 8%; monthly range 7,400–13,700; peak just over 15,000 in October 2025 — report pp. 7–8.
Approximately 40% of operations are GA local, defined as departing LMO and returning within 75 minutes; close to 99% of operations are general aviation — report pp. 8–9.
Operations by day of week, 2025: Sunday 12.4%, Monday 13.9%, Tuesday 13.4%, Wednesday 16.8%, Thursday 16.4%, Friday 14.5%, Saturday 12.6% — report p. 9.
Approximately 88% of 2025 operations fell in the 8 AM–8 PM preferred window, 12% outside it — roughly 16,500 flights a year, about 45 a day — report p. 10.
Operations by aircraft category (Figure 10): single engine 116,716 → 125,666; multi engine 8,488 → 9,395; rotorcraft 312 → 825; glider 423 → 547; data unavailable 480 → 670; other 188 → 345. Most common types Cessna 172, Piper PA-28, Beech 76 — report pp. 10–11.
Mile High Skydiving operations (Figure 12), monthly, summing to 4,479 in 2024 and 3,945 in 2025 — a decline of 534 flights, or 11.9% — against the report’s statement that skydiving is “about 3% of annual operations” — report pp. 11–12.
Runway use approximately 65% Runway 29 / 35% Runway 11, “consistent with the wind direction and frequency for the period of 2024 and 2025” — report p. 12.
“Landing-Fees” subsection: the local perception; the 12,500 lb threshold at most Colorado airports; light GA under 3,000 lb as “over 90% of the operations at Vance Brand”; the four commercial-service airports charging light-GA fees — report pp. 20–21.
“Repetitive touch-and-go operations, especially from aircraft perceived to originate from Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport” — report p. 26.
Survey open comments on landing fees, taxpayer subsidy, and self-sustainability, quoted to their printed pages — report Appendix I, pp. 67, 72, 73.
Presentation only; “Some recommendations from the VNAP will require Council direction and additional funding to move forward”; recommended action and fiscal impact both “N/A”; full recommendation list including operator-level conformance analytics, public dashboard, 2025 baseline targets, complaint tracking, transparency reports, and dedicated staffing — Council Communication, Item 9.B, July 28, 2026, pp. 1–3.
Landing-fee scenarios ($162,195 transient-only and $237,690 combined at $2 per 1,000 lb, net of the 20% collection charge); working capital turning negative in 2028 and “Critical” by 2030; “requires deliberate fiscal intervention”; Exhibit E operations of ~126,600; the defensible-fee checklist — City of Longmont 2026 Rates and Charges Study (Bolton & Menk), pp. 28–38, 67, as documented on the companion page.
Total airport lease revenue of $597,370 across 122 hangar and ground leases, 2026 — City of Longmont Airport Leasing Document, as documented on the economic-impact page.

137,452 Operations. Zero Collected. The City finally counted its own runway. The count is a funding document — and it arrives at Council with “fiscal impact: N/A.”