If a new business plan is not put into place, the Georgetown Municipal Airport may have to dip into the city's general fund to keep up with maintenance and operation costs.

While putting together the airport's annual budget, city staff identified several capital maintenance and operational costs that would cause the airport fund to have a negative fund balance by the end of the fiscal year, Transportation Director Ed Polasek said.

"This is just some of the basic capital maintenance needs," Polasek said. "In our budget process, we found that just routine maintenance, just having the ability to do the herbicide and mowing and spraying of the runways to protect the runways themselves, required additional time and labor that we've never had in the airport budget."

At its Sept. 11 meeting, City Council approved $100,000 to complete a Georgetown Municipal Airport Business Case Analysis that will assess and provide recommendations to create a financially sustainable airport.

The contract was awarded to consultants CH2M Hill.

"There are a lot of policy issues and a lot of financial issues that we really didn't have a business plan for, and every other utility in the City of Georgetown—water, wastewater, electric—they have business plans for how they are going to maintain and grow the utility," Polasek said. "Well, we've never had that for the airport. This is the step we are trying to take."

Some of the maintenance and operations costs include regular inspections of city-owned facilities, which are not part of a regular inspections process, he said.

"We don't have a routine inspection program and maintenance program for the roof and the structures themselves," Polasek said. "We just have an account for funding repairs to the garage doors or the hangar doors, but we never had a routine inspection done by city staff or some type of building professional on the facilities themselves."

Along with regular inspections, Polasek said the airport does not have funds to do routine maintenance related to clearing trees and debris from the runway and maintaining fences to keep animals from the airport.

Other funding issues related to airport policy, including upgrades to the fuel farm and the leases and rate structures, are also issues that will be addressed in the business plan, he said.

Polasek said increased competition for jet traffic from Austin Executive Airport and decreasing fuel sales have been factors in the airport's shrinking revenue.

"With the competition we are receiving from Austin Executive Airport as far as jet traffic and maintaining jet traffic at the airport, we have to re-evaluate and make a decision as far as the length of the runway for jets in the future as well," Polasek said, referencing the cost of extending the runway from 5,000 to 6,000 feet.

The results of the analysis could be taken back to City Council in March to discuss its effect on next year's airport budget.

"This is an economic development tool, and we haven't been treating it as such," he said. "So we are trying to take that opportunity and go back and treat it as such."