Kalispell City Airport Planning GrantJane and Fred,
I have scheduled a meeting with both of you on Wednesday, May 12th at
8:30 AM to discuss the scope of work for the Master Plan Update at
Kalispell City Airport. Timing is getting short to pull this altogether
so I wanted to lay out a proposed schedule to make all this come
together:
1. Draft Scope of Work: I will put together a draft scope of work
for a Master Plan Update by noon on Tuesday and email it to you, Fred,
and Gary. I see much of the scope of work being an exercise to confirm
elements of the original master plan; but we will also need to prepare
revised aviation forecasts and determine the current critical aircraft.
There may also be some items that the FAA will require even if the City
does not see the value in doing it. One of these items is updating
alternative airport sites. The FAA may require us to ensure that the
original sites from the site selection study are still feasible or if
not, to find new sites. Even though the City does not want to relocate
the airport, we may be required to include this in our evaluation.
2. Finalize Scope of Work: Wednesday’s meeting needs to be a work
session for us to thoroughly review the SOW and amend it accordingly.
The primary input I will need from you and Fred is an understanding of
how much public coordination we want to include during the planning
phase. This would include public information meetings throughout the
process and any other public outreach we want to include. We also need
to discuss the extent we should evaluate new alternatives (rotations,
skews, shifts, etc.) at the existing site. We don’t want to reinvent
the wheel here but there may be some new considerations that were not
evaluated 10 years ago. I would like to have a final scope of work
emailed out to Gary Gates by Friday next week. The normal process
requires that the FAA approve our scope of work before we proceed to fee
negotiations.
3. Normally, we would wait for the FAA’s concurrence in scope
before we proceed to fee negotiations. Unfortunately, we are going to
have to put the cart in-front of the horse and prepare the fee
concurrently with the scope of work. You will have to take the Contract
to City Council for approval at the May 17th meeting. Council needs to
understand that the FAA may come back with scope changes that require a
fee increase or decrease. We could address this by an amendment or by
revising the contract, but you would have to have the authority to
execute the change so that we can get the grant application and final
contract approved by the FAA by June 1st.
Hope this is helpful and I’ll do what I can to expedite things quicker
if possible. If Gary can get us his comments before we go to Council on
the 17th we won’t have to do an amendment or revise the contract that
council approves.
Jeff Walla, PE
Stelling Engineers, Inc.
1372 Airport Road
Kalispell, MT 59901
phone: 406-755-8602
fax: 406-755-8710
email: jwalla@stellinginc.com <mailto:jwalla@jwalla@stellinginc.com>