I suppose I should update this.
I did attend the meeting. The meeting wasn't really to get our opinions; the purpose was to inform us about what was going on and answer our questions, and they did a pretty fair job of that.
It appears we
will be getting a remote tower at Winter Haven (KGIF). This is one small part of a
much larger county initiative that involves a private controller training academy, the creation of a new aeronautical high school in Winter Haven, new businesses moving to Polk County including Frequentis (
https://www.frequentis.com/ ) relocating its headquarters to the area, getting contracts to provide remote towers and controllers for airports in the Bahamas, etc., etc. Lots of new jobs and businesses.
The reason for selecting Bartow for the academy and the control facility is that Bartow (KBOW) is one of a handful of towered airports that is not federally controlled. Thus Bartow can pretty much do whatever they want as far as amount of training and numbers of controllers. I was unaware of this but it made sense once they explained it.
I asked about any cost impacts to fuel or hangar rent and I was told that is very unlikely. KGIF is funded out of the city's general fund and its funding is not directly tied to its revenues. There are quite a few other airports nearby, and raising rents or fuel prices would tend to drive people elsewhere. The KGIF manager believes he will need to remain competitive with nearby airports.
They
do expect revenue to go up at KGIF, though, due to an anticipated increase in charter and business traffic. Presently, there are charter companies who are not allowed to use our untowered airport due to insurance restrictions so they're flying into Lakeland or Kissimmee. One we become a class delta, it's expected that some of them will begin using KGIF.
I also asked about Jack Brown's seaplane base, which falls within the proposed class delta. They are already in discussion with Brown's and will put a letter of agreement in place regarding coordination. I was told they have done this before with other seaplane bases. I'm not sure how that will eventually work, but it almost has to be better than what we have now, which is nothing. KGIF's pattern for 5-23 falls directly over the lake runway and the only coordination today is keeping a sharp eye out.
As presently planned, all the construction cost will be born by the academy, and the academy will pay operating expenses whenever training is happening. That will probably be 6 to 8 hours a day M-F. If the airport wants towered operations beyond those hours, the cost would fall to the city. The consensus seemed to be that there would likely be a small extension to the school-paid hours to provide tower ops in the evening, maybe on weekends, and that hours could be increased beyond that during high-traffic periods such as Sun-N-Fun.
There were a couple of objecting curmudgeons at the meeting ("Been flyin' here for 50 years and I want you to keep off my lawn!"), but overall most attendees seemed pleased. I think it will turn out to be a good thing and improve safety, even though I think they're pretty optimistic about costs and schedule.
We shall see.
I had forgot the whole thing started out with Remote. Now I'm wondering. Maybe there could be enough camera angles to allow human observation. I dunno. Bring it up and get back to us on that? When did you say this meeting was?
