The Issue

For more than a decade there has been an effort to allow bigger planes to land at Aspen Airport. Both the County and the FAA want this outcome, but for different reasons, and each claims the other is driving it, though that’s hardly relevant.

What is relevant is that allowing bigger planes at ASE would require changing the current airfield layout and losing the 95-foot wingspan limit currently in place. The push for bigger planes has led to an FAA-encouraged airfield redesign (or Airport Layout Plan) that would overturn the 1995 voter rejection of bigger planes at ASE. It would also rescind the Modification of Standard that, for a quarter of a century, has helped keep Aspen Airport safe and our economy thriving.

The issue is not about restoring the past but protecting our future, because the bigger planes an ASE airfield expansion would accommodate from its first day of operations would also bring increased pollution, noise, and crowding to our home.

Neither the majority of the Pitkin County public nor the commercial airlines have asked for bigger planes at ASE. On the contrary, in 2024–25 both United and Delta replaced their legacy CRJ-700 regional jets (which American still operates) with Embraer E175 regional jets. The E175’s summer 2025 Aspen operations went well, with better comfort and less weather-sensitivity. Crucially, the E175’s wingspan fits the existing airfield layout, requiring no runway relocation. Thus the two airlines providing more than three-fourths of Aspen’s commercial service have rejected the mainline Airbus A220-300 that the FAA forced into the County’s Aviation Forecast as the Critical Design Aircraft and the sole declared basis for increasing runway separation and width. Yet the push for costly airfield expansion to accept such bigger planes persisted. In other words, the 2013–24 claim that Aspen Airport must rebuild its airfield for bigger planes because the airlines will require them has now been falsified by both deciding airlines' market choices. Therefore the key premise of the FAA-approved Forecast has collapsed, yet that disproven assumption continues on autopilot, with no way to question or correct it. Bureaucratic momentum has outlived rationale.

In the latter part of 2024, the County spent tens of thousands of dollars each month on advertising, public relations, and lobbying to promote airport expansion's supposed necessity with a barrage of increasingly fanciful arguments. Many County allies chimed in with letters, op-eds, and public events. Colorado’s Fair Campaign Practices Act forbids using public funds (including paid elected officials’ time) to sway voters, so all public funding must cease once two citizen initiatives were proposed, or at latest set, for the 5 November 2024 ballot. However, all five BOCC members, five members of the Airport Advisory Board, and one member of the County’s Financial Advisory Board signed on as private citizens to support a new influence organization announced on 30 July 2024 to continue the campaign for expansion. Thus paid elected officials barred from influencing a public vote had the same names and faces as principals of a lobbying organization set up to to do so.

Voters were further influenced by an elaborate, skilled, and generously but opaquely funded campaign whose advocates included the Aspen Chamber and Resort Association, Aspen Skiing Company, and Pitkin County Democrats. ACRA was already campaigning for expansion before hearing Aspen Fly Right’s views on 27 August 2024, and didn’t reconsider its message. SkiCo and PCD didn’t inform their decision process by discussing the complex issues with the leaders of the three citizen groups favoring a modern airport without bigger planes: Aspen Fly Right, Citizens Against Bigger Planes, and its issue committee Our Airport Our Vote. Thus a coordinated campaign to reinforce official positions was powered by major businesses’ public views, their pressure on employees, and their and private donors’ wealth (provided largely untraceably). Pitkin County Democrats’ respected, influential, and normally well-researched Blue Card voting guide endorsed the County’s position based on important misunderstandings of fact and law. PCD reneged on its agreement to post opposing arguments from the campaign group and background from Aspen Fly Right on its website, and both Aspen newspaper editors agreed but failed to print summaries. Thus disinformation was rife, key organizations were enlisted without doing their homework, and opposing views were largely unavailable to voters.

In these circumstances, the County’s view prevailed by 3:2 over the citizen initiative (ballot measure 200) that would have required a vote of the people on any relocation or expansion of the runway—the only effective and legal way to vote on allowing bigger planes. Votes favoring the County’s position were 55% of ballots cast and 44% of active registered voters; votes against bigger planes were respectively 40% and 29%. The County’s competing ballot measure 1C, gratuitously reaffirming the BOCC’s authority over airport decisions, passed by 2:1, with 62% of ballots cast and 49% of active voters supporting the County’s position. Total voter turnout was 80%.

Interpreting these results as a resounding community endorsement, in 2025 the BOCC moved ahead with an Airport Layout Plan, environmental assessment, and other actions to allow bigger planes by moving the runway 80’ west while rebuilding the runway and also rebuilding the passenger terminal and ground transport infrastructure. The County proposed to bond airport revenues (not general tax revenues) by up to $340 million to finance all airport improvements including “airfield pavement infrastructure.” That would tacitly include moving the runway to allow bigger planes. Voters are to have no further choice about that, except by potentially re-invoking, in some future year, the rights of initiative and referendum guaranteed by the Pitkin County Home Rule Charter and the Colorado Constitution—rights superior to the 2024 Measure 1C.

Astonishingly, despite promising new leadership, the Board of Pitkin County Democrats voted to support the Airport bond issue, Measure 1A, in its 2025 Blue Card. Yet again, abdicating its responsibility of due diligence to understand the issues, the Board majority did not to talk to any of the leaders of the three opposing citizen groups. It relied instead on the 2024 vote—which its own misinformation and misunderstandings had strongly influenced—and on information from the County. This continuing malfeasance cannot help to restore trust in an important and traditionally reliable source of information on complex policy issues.

Aspen Fly Right was established as a transparent educational, scientific, and charitable nonprofit organization specifically to examine and explain airport issues so the people of Pitkin County can make a fact-based decision about our airport and its impact on our quality of life. Airport rebuilding is expected to take at least until 2029, so this need and this work will continue.