San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Ambitious makeover plan for airport is bold, costly — and needed
The 20-year-old plan to remake San Antonio International Airport is finally out, and it is sweeping. As expected.
Frustration with San Antonio’s bland little airport has been mounting. Think back to three years ago when former Mayor Henry Cisneros called in an Express-News guest op-ed for effectively chucking San Antonio International and building bigger elsewhere.
Boiled down, his message — shared by many other members of the city’s business-politico complex — was that both San Antonio and its aspirations were bigger than its airport.
Earlier in 2018, Mayor Ron Nirenberg had appointed the 21-member Airport System Development Commission and picked cybersecurity executive John Dickson to chair it. The commission pretty quickly knocked down the idea of moving the airport to a roomier part of San Antonio.
Its members — working with the city aviation director, his staff and consultants — then set about blowing up the status quo within San Antonio International’s existing 2,600-acre footprint.
The result: a multi-phase project that promises to be one of the city’s biggest, costliest capital projects ever. If City
Council OKs the plan — members are expected to vote on it in December — the price could top $2 billion.
Airport revenue bonds would pay for most of the work, with passenger fees, concessions, airline rents and a handful of other income streams paying off the debt. Federal funding also is expected to come into play.
Aviation Department officials previewed the master plan at two public meetings this week — one at the Barshop Jewish Community Center on the North Side Tuesday, the other a virtual event Thursday.
The redevelopment would start with fireworks: construction of a third terminal and a new parking garage. The plan’s timelines have the two structures, roadway work and smaller projects being completed by 2030 at a cost of between between $880 million and $950 million.
Terminal C would eat up most of that funding, with an estimated price tag from $790 million to $840 million. The new facility would bring the number of gates to as many as 37 from today’s 23.
With those projects out of the way, Terminal B would be reworked
as a central ticketing facility, a one-stop airline checkin and security checkpoint that would allow travelers to wander between restaurants, bars and shops in each terminal. As is, Terminals A and B have their own check-ins; once you’re made it through security, you’re stuck in whichever terminal you’re flying out of.
International dreams
Also down the road is a runway expansion to 10,000 feet from 8,500 feet to accommodate bigger cargo and passenger jets. This part of the 2040 plan isn’t pressing, however. The airport’s runway today can handle international flights, say on an Airbus A350, to as far away as Frankfurt, Germany, and into South America.
Not that airlines are clammering to offer service from San Antonio to Europe or South America. But airport officials swear there’s enough demand to justify such flights.
“Airlines always have a wish list of where they want to go to next. Our job is to move us up that list,” said Brian Pratte, the city’s chief air service and marketing officer. “Prior to the pandemic, we were the third-largest market without transatlantic service. Based on existing demand, people were traveling to and from Europe. So we’re one of the next (airports) to check off the list.”
He said there’s also enough demand to justify flights to Central and South America.
(A quick aside: Mexico is big for San Antonio International — with service to Mexico City, León, Guadalajara, Monterrey and Cancún — and getting bigger.)
The gnome
And then there’s the replacement of Terminal A, the cranky gnome of municipal airport facilities. At its narrowest point, travelers are crowded cattle-like within a span of 70 feet. It has too few restrooms and its electrical system is outdated. The city has spent about $35 million in recent years to patch it up but it’s still Terminal A.
This facility, which opened in 1984, is one of the bigger insults
to San Antonio’s pride. As such,
its demolition and replacement has been a foregone conclusion. It’s the least newsworthy part of the master plan.
Still, the thought of the old Terminal A’s demise is heartwarming.
San Antonio is the seventhlargest city in the U.S., with population growth of 8 percent between 2010 and 2020. As of 2020, more than 1.4 million people lived here. Yet it remains one of the poorest major cities in the country and its economy continues to lag those of Austin, Dallas and Houston.
San Antonio struggles to attract higher-paying jobs, to carve
out a place in a fast-moving, information-driven global economy that puts a premium on higher technical skills. But it’s making progress, and wants much more of it.
Terminal A is 360,000-squarefoot reminder of an older San Antonio, the one that was sold to out-of-town companies as nothing more than a low-wage, nonunion town.
Balancing act
The 20-year plan for the airport is an attempt to match its terminal, parking, runway and roadway capacity to the anticipated growth in the number of
passengers.
In a pre-COVID-19 forecast, airport officials predicted the number of travelers flying out of San Antonio would increase about 2 percent annually. In the years to come, the city’s population gains and San Antonians’ economic wellbeing — that is, having jobs that require crosscountry travel or the disposable income to take out-of-state pleasure trips — will determine whether that projection is on the money.
San Antonio International at the moment is recovering nicely from the pandemic. Just more than 713,400 passengers passed
through the airport in August, which was 82 percent of the number in August 2019, six months before the cataclysm.
Which might make the 2040 plan easier for council members to swallow.
But the plan is also about trying to break out of San Antonio’s historic, self-effacing, small-time mindset. For this aspect of the project, ambition will be the underwriter, not Wall Street.
Aviation Director Jesus Saenz Jr. reflects that aspiration.
“When you look at Dallas, the large city that it is — you look at Houston, the large city it has
become — you look at Austin, the large city it’s becoming — San Antonio’s next,” Saenz said. “Any way you slice this pie, it is the next big city in the state of Texas. It’s going to happen.”
He may be right, and I think the plan he’s rolling out is a good one.
The airport’s rebirth will succeed if Saenz and John Dickson’s development commission have struck the right balance between aspiration and realism.
In other words, their passenger-growth projections had better be rock-solid.