Three Hundred Sixty Four days, the Alcon Construction superintendent said emphatically.
Like a proud papa, Alcon’s Kerry Smith was going over the new 10,000-square-foot building for snow removal equipment and aircraft rescue and firefighting that sits west of the runway at the San Luis Valley Regional Airport.
The goal was to get the new building constructed within a year and as Smith noted this week, it got completed not in 365 days, but 364.
“I enjoyed the hell out of it,” he said of the construction project.
San Luis Valley Regional Airport Enplanements.
An enplanement is a passenger boarding a commercial air carrier in Alamosa.
| 2024 Enplanements | 12,077 |
| 2023 Enplanements | 10,904 |
| 2022 Enplanements | 8,851 |
The building, at a cost of around $5 million, is among a string of projects intended to improve the safety and overall operations of the airfield that airport manager Will Hickman has pushed through over the past two years.
Hickman arrived in 2018 and has had his hands full with upgrades required by the Federal Aviation Administration for Alamosa County to maintain commercial air service for the San Luis Valley and neighboring northern New Mexico.
Under Hickman’s supervision and now with essential air service provided by Denver Air Connection, San Luis Valley Regional Airport has pushed past a critical threshold of 10,000 annual enplanements and reached over 12,000 passengers boarding in Alamosa in 2024.
“We wouldn’t be able to pay for that kind of thing if we didn’t have the air carrier in here because the airline, when we get those enplanements, that’s what gives us the major funding from the FAA,” Hickman said.
“If you have 10,000 (enplanements) or over per year, you have grant money guaranteed at $1 million a year. Now that can’t be used for operational costs, it can only be used for safety-enhancing projects. So most of the time you do stuff on the runway to improve your runways, your navigational aids, which is one of the things we’re doing.”
The San Luis Valley Regional Airport sits on 1,700 acres, and it’s the job of Hickman and his crew of six to keep the airfield tidy, inspect the runways twice a day, conduct daily perimeter checks, and ensure the airport meets all the requirements of the FAA, including how quickly a door can rise to get a fire engine onto the runway if necessary.
On the new building that Alcon just completed, there’s a 25-foot garage door, behind which sits a fire truck. The FAA has a safety regulation that requires a door that can open within 16 seconds.
“We came up with a specially-designed door that was going to open so far, so fast,” said Smith of how Alcon met the FAA’s door-opening safety regulation.
Where the new building is located, near the middle of the airstrip, is another calculation Hickman and the Alcon Construction crew made to meet FAA safety rules.
“One of our requirements is from the time, if there is an accident on the field, for us to respond we’re closer now to the midpoint of the runway, which when you’re doing drills, you have to get to the midpoint in under three minutes from the time of alarm. So we should be able to cut a minute or so off our time and get out there quicker.”
Hickman, along with five of the airport’s operations and maintenance staff members, are trained in aircraft rescue and firefighting. The new building was designed to be a snow removal equipment building and a fire station.
“One of the requirements for being a certificated airport, to provide commercial air carrier service, is you have to have a heated facility to house your snow equipment and your ARFF (aircraft rescue and firefighting) equipment,” Hickman said.
Again the FAA regulations, but also access to federal grants to help meet the cost of construction.
A seal-coat runway project, an airport drainage study, a project to paint the taxiway markings, and replacing signs that display the distance remaining to the end of the runway are all projects funded and either completed or expected to be completed in 2025.
But it’s another effort to develop a new Airport Master Plan that could hold the key to the airport’s future. Hickman’s goal is to make the airport self-sustaining and not requiring an annual subsidy payment from Alamosa County government to keep it operational.
That’s why the airport moved last year to implement paid parking, to create another revenue stream to meet annual operations. The airport has an annual budget of nearly $3.4 million in 2025, but it won’t generate enough revenue to break even and instead Alamosa County will contribute around $500,000 to balance out costs.
The Airport Master Plan would focus on “existing and future airport design standards along with meeting existing and future airside and landside development needs over a 20-year planning period,” according to Hickman.
With the airport property encompassing 1,700 acres, Hickman and Alamosa County are looking for ways to develop the land that surrounds the airport itself. There’s a need for more hangars for private aircraft that use the airstrip and there’s potential for other commercial development that could augment the revenues of the airport.
“That’s a big, big goal of ours,” Hickman said of the airport bringing in enough revenue to support itself. “It’s going to take some time.”
Time the SLV Regional Airport has, given its growing local passenger traffic and the new safety improvements that have been accomplished.