Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, which would like us to call it AUS and not ABIA, has been in the news lately for reasons it would rather not be. It got wrapped around the axle at City Council for springing its new jet fuel depot on its nearby neighbors by surprise, and it made national headlines a couple weeks back for a complete meltdown at its short-staffed Transportation Security Administration checkpoints. So what the heck is going on?
Basically, it’s the same dynamic that’s driving the exponential increase in home prices and property appraisals: Everybody wants to get a piece of Austin before it’s too late. The AUS expansion master plan, adopted in 2019, was basically made obsolete by COVID-19 and has already been outstripped by demand; while the master plan remains in place, focus has shifted to the current Airport Expansion and Development Program.* Or, in the biz-speak of the professionals running the airport: “Following major COVID-19 impacts, AUS re-strategized the Airport Expansion Program to meet our Recovery Profile … The AEDP will increase capacity at AUS using a strategic approach, including optimizing the Barbara Jordan Terminal and enabling our future expansion with utility and airfield infrastructure. Timelines for projects will be different than were originally anticipated prior to COVID-19.”
That’s why the public engagement that had been done, or that was supposed to happen in the future, regarding the fuel depot failed so badly. The AEDP is going through federal environmental assessment – a lighter- weight version of the process being used for I-35 and Project Connect – on a rolling basis, so not everything in the “re-strategized” vision has been exposed to public engagement. But it basically has three parts – the two referenced in the AUS statement above (optimizing the BJT and building out infrastructure, which includes that fuel depot) and the actual big deal, a new midfield concourse that could add 24 gates over time, connected by a tunnel to a new BJT “entrance hall.” As noted elsewhere in this issue, that tunnel may have attracted the attention of the Boring Company.
The entrance hall is a big deal because the lack of one is basically what made the recent TSA staffing meltdown into a national news story – the lines extended out the doors because there is so little space in between the checkpoints and the street, a design feature that became a flaw post-9/11. The expanded checkpoint at the low-numbered end of the existing concourse is part of “optimizing” the BJT, so the capacity to handle large crowds is mostly there; it’s TSA’s ability to staff it up that is lacking, and that’s for the same reasons that every other public-sector employer, from the police department to the schools to the city permitting staff, is short-staffed – the hotter-than-hell Austin labor market and the long-tail Great Resignation as we exit the pandemic.
Airport Advisory Commission Chair Eugene Sepulveda, who has many connections inside City Hall and in the tech world, summed up his and AUS’s assessment and advice in this regard: “The airport deeply regrets the trouble caused to passengers, and we’re greatly pleased that the airport, TSA, airlines, and passengers are all stepping up. But at the tail end of the pandemic, with labor conditions as they are in Austin, we’ll always have that vulnerability. So get there two hours ahead of time.”
* Editor’s note (Apr 22 12 noon): This story has been updated since publication to clarify the relationship between the 2019 AUS master plan and the current AEDP.
This article appears in April 22 • 2022.