Yakima Air Terminal Director Rob Hodgman has a unique perspective on the Legislature-created Commercial Aviation Coordinating Commission.
The commission, tasked in 2019 with recommending a single location for a new aviation facility to relieve overcrowding at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, flew under the public’s radar until it issued a list of three finalist sites in 2022.
Those three sites, in Pierce and Thurston counties, generated tremendous opposition from members of the public living nearby, along with Puget Sound-area city, county and tribal governments. Eventually, the opposition prompted state lawmakers to disband the panel and create a new Commercial Aviation Work Group to restart the discussion of a regional airport site.
Hodgman was heavily involved in the CACC’s meetings and deliberations through his job as the Washington State Department of Transportation’s senior aviation planner. He was a nonvoting member of the state panel. He worked at WSDOT from 2012 until he was hired by the city of Yakima in March of this year.
He was disappointed that CACC members, in their final meeting on June 9, did not invite him to present more information about his updated proposal for the Yakima airport that would use electric-powered aircraft to bring people from elsewhere in the state to Yakima.
Hodgman’s future-looking plan, presented to the Washington State Transportation Commission during its April meeting in Ellensburg, would have those passengers board larger aircraft at an expanded Yakima airport to travel to their destinations across the country. He said there was interest from Puget Sound region residents and legislators in the Yakima proposal.
“It doesn’t surprise me that some commission members stated what they did about Yakima, because they were coming from an uninformed position,” Hodgman said. “And it could have been a completely different outcome if the CACC had invited us to come and present.”
CACC Chair Warren Hendrickson surveyed the 22 commission members about their work over the past four years, with 16 of them responding to various questions.
One question asked if Yakima Air Terminal/McAllister Field should be selected as the single preferred location for a new primary commercial aviation facility. Only three survey respondents replied “yes,” 11 respondents replied “no” and the other two did not answer the question, Hendrickson said.
Hodgman discussed other aspects of the site-selection process and his thoughts about Yakima’s chances with the new aviation work group during a Wednesday, June 14, interview with the Yakima Herald-Republic.
The last CACC meeting … you probably saw that most of them didn’t think Yakima was much of a long-term solution, as part of the state’s aviation. Were you a little surprised by that?
Yes and no. There’s actually a lot to this.
First, I have to say that I was disappointed that after almost four years of work and hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars invested, that the end result, the final report to the Legislature is basically the opinions of some of the commission members based on a survey. That seems like a missed opportunity.
I feel like it’s a missed opportunity because we could have gotten a lot further down the road of progress toward solving this if they simply would have allowed us to come and present our case.
I’m not saying that our presentation would have in any way made Yakima the single preferred location, but the commission members and anyone from the community who tuned in to that presentation would have had a much better understanding of the potential that Yakima Air Terminal has to help solve this problem.
It’s not some pie-in-the-sky type of proposal. There’s a tremendous amount of credibility in what we’re offering.
The reason it’s important is because there’s some pretty credible information that Sea-Tac’s going to reach capacity by 2032. So we have less than nine years to solve this problem.
Now with this new work group forming up and starting their process, it’s reasonable to consider that it will be one to two years, easily, before they are ready to provide enough information for someone to make a decision.
This working group does not make any recommendations; they just provide the opportunities and the constraints at these various different sites.
It’s a missed opportunity because we could have gotten a jump start on the whole process of understanding what Yakima has to offer. We’re pretty much in the middle of the state, and we’re easily accessible by I-90 and I-82, whereas other locations either are not in the center of the state or are not easily accessible.
Even though the proposal is to fly in (passengers) on electric aviation, you still have to have ground support for an airport with that volume of passengers, with all the other things that have to come and go. Certainly there will be some people who want to come by ground; some people from Ellensburg, for example, can just come down I-82.
I was disappointed that we weren’t issued an invitation and discouraged that the CACC did not have an opportunity to hear what Yakima has to offer.
Because the proposal you’re talking about with electric aircraft is something that won’t be ready until the future, it looks like with the site-selection process being kicked down the road a few years, there’s a little more time for those technological developments with the aircraft.
Yes. I think that, historically, we know it takes about 10 years to expand an existing airport, and more than 10 years to build a new airport — and that’s if there’s not a lot of environmental issues and public opposition. So it could be longer.
And we have the projections from both Eviation for their Alice (electric aircraft) and then Heart Aerospace and their ES-30, and they’re in the 2027-28 timeframe. That still is plenty of time to be ready by 2032.
But now, with the commission not making any recommendation whatsoever, and with the new working group needing some time to ramp up and begin to understand the nature of the problem and start to try to figure out solutions, it could easily be two-three years.
Let’s just say we project to 2025 before we have a recommendation or whatever it is that they will provide. Well, 10 years puts us to 2035, and that’s without any constraints from environmental or legal or public opposition. So we’re already three years behind from when Sea-Tac meets full capacity.
The implications of when Sea-Tac meets full capacity — even with all their plans for the second terminal and all the rest of that — it’s not just for the region; it’s for the entire state. It affects the number of flights, the number of seats available. People who want to travel on an airplane won’t be able to do so.
The last question would be, this work group — would you have any interest in being on it? Do you know who will be on it?
I don’t know who will be on it. I haven’t really thought about whether I would be interested. Airport managers (from across the state) were on the CACC. … I suspect because of my prior role with the CACC and because of my role here in Yakima, they probably won’t offer it to me, and I’m OK with that.
