Airport, National Guard working through lease details

After several months in its new midfield terminal, the Springfield-Branson National Airport may have found a tenant for the old terminal building.

Airport officials are in negotiations with the Missouri National Guard, which sent the airport board a letter of intent to occupy the vacant space.

No binding agreement has been signed, and no lease rate has been set for the facility, according to the two-page letter of intent released by the airport. The letter simply states that the guard and the airport will negotiate exclusively with each other.

Brig. Gen. Stephen Danner, adjutant general of the Missouri National Guard, said the guard has been looking to expand its southwest Missouri presence for quite some time.

The guard operates an Aviation Classification Repair Activity Depot facility at the airport and an armory on Fremont Street that house a combined 750 soldiers.

"With the (airport) facility available with two 8,000-foot runways and the robust presence the Missouri National Guard already has at the airport with the AVCRAD facility, it was a natural that we look to expand our footprint here," Danner said from his post in Jefferson City.

The guard already is working on Phase I of a $42 million expansion to the AVCRAD facility, which would add another 145 positions.

The expansion is partially funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but the availability of the old airport terminal means the guard could bring up to 500 additional Army National Guard soldiers to the area, along with a new presence for the Air National Guard.

The goal, according to Danner, is to make the Springfield area a power projection platform, which serves as a launching point for troops and air personnel to respond to national emergencies such as earthquakes or large hurricanes.

"As a whole, southwest Missouri is a great area for recruitment; we find our recruiting there to be proportionally as good or better than other parts of the state, and the recruits we get are very enthusiastic about service to the country," Danner said. "We also have a highly educated population in southwest Missouri and a plethora of universities and vocational schools."

Danner didn't have a specific time frame for when the project might happen, but he said teams from the Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., and from Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., have visited the area.

He said the guard could place part of the additional troops in the area in the next few months.

Kent Boyd, the airport's director of public information and marketing, said the airport would like to see the building leased by the end of the year, though it's understood that the process might not move that quickly.

"Working with the military is a very deliberate process," Boyd said. "It certainly doesn't move as fast as it would if this were a negotiation with a private industry."

Boyd said having a tenant in that space is important for the financial health of the airport.

"We have all these revenue streams - landing fees, rental fees from the airlines - that are directly tied to the health of the aviation industry, and as goes the health of the aviation industry, so goes the health of those revenue streams," Boyd said, adding that officials hope to bring in about half a million dollars a year in outside revenue. "The more revenue we have that's not related to the industry, the better off the health of the airport is."

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