DOVER—Ten years in the making, the City of Dover is closer than ever to a joint-use agreement with Dover Air Force Base that would allow for commercial flights to and from the base’s flight line.
Dover City Manager David Hugg gave City Council members an update during Tuesday’s Committee of the Whole meeting.
“This has been at least a 10-year adventure and I say adventure because we've been working (with) DelDOT, the River and Bay Authority, the Department of Defense, and all their various lawyers with assistance from Senator Carper, Senator Coons, Representative Blunt-Rochester, and others,” said Mr. Hugg.
He said the agreement is now on the Secretary of Defense’s desk waiting for the final signature, after which business can begin almost immediately. It will allow for civilian aircraft of all sizes.
This would not be the first time a deal like this was struck, as a similar arrangement was in place in 1982 and saw little use, but Mr. Hugg said that this agreement’s 50-year lifespan makes the site perfect to bring maintenance and shipment industries to Dover.
The agreement also allows civilian planes to park long-term, a limitation in the 1982 iteration of the agreement, which Mr. Hugg said was scheduled to expire in 2020 but had a series of extensions added to it.
“It's some $30,000 round trip to move an airplane from Dover to (major airports) and back under the old arrangement,” said Mr. Hugg. “Atlas (Air) in particular, would fly over a load of flowers and unload and then they'd be required, I think within five or six hours, to leave the airbase and fly somewhere else for the night to come back to pick up another shipment.”
Dover Mayor Robin R. Christiansen weighed in on the agreement as well, noting the jobs the agreement would create.
“One of the things that we have to offer, as Mr. Hugg alluded to, is a captive audience of people who, when they retire with the skills that they have, of fixing airplanes, loading and unloading airplanes, they leave. We want to keep them here,” said Mayor Christiansen. “We want them to use our enterprise funds. We want them to be part of the fabric of our community, help our schools improve, and just make Dover a better place to live, work, and play.”
He also notes that job creation would not be limited only to people with prior experience either, creating a workforce that can eventually take the place of aging predecessors.
“We're going to provide jobs in cooperation with Capital School District, Polytech, Del Tech, for the young people in the community who don't want to go necessarily to college but pursue a path of (fixing, loading, and unloading airplanes).”
The mayor had a positive outlook on Dover’s future, in part helped by this agreement.
“We are the center of the universe,” said Mayor Christiansen. “We are in great proximity to all the major cities both via air and via surface transportation, and I think we've got it all. I think that's why they're looking at us.”
Councilman Andre Boggerty, once a mechanic in the Air Force himself, also gave input on the positives of the agreement.
“Now having just left Charleston, South Carolina, it's a bustling area. And part of the reason it's bustling is because the civilian jobs are Boeing and other aircraft companies. When you land in Charleston, you see one half of the base and the other half you see (commercial business),” said Councilman Boggerty. “I'm excited because I know that there are a lot of people that I was stationed with, the only reason they left is there wasn't a space for many of us to land after our careers in the military.”
The agreement would remove a fee for landing, as well as a requirement for early notice to the base for incoming flights. It would allow for 25,000 takeoffs and landings per year.
Mr. Hugg did not see traditional passenger flights coming to the base in the near future, but charter flights were on the table.
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