“It should be knowledge to somebody in the county that when we are constructing a facility that is not aviation use on airport grounds that we need approval to do so prior to, and there's a fee involved for doing so. We have to buy the land at fair market,” Precinct 3 Commissioner James Noack said at an April 11 Commissioners Court meeting.
Noack pulled the entire consent agenda into open meeting April 11 after the item appeared under the consent agenda. Items on the consent agenda are typically approved as a single motion without discussion.
According to James Brown, the director of the Conroe-North Houston Airport, the property on which the $13 million new forensic center was built at 9900 Carl Pickering Drive was thought to be county property, but it was later identified as airport property by the FAA and the Texas Department of Transportation.
“I think it's challenging, too, because the land—if you were to go out there prior to being built—the land is separated by public roads, but it is designated as airport property. There was an airspace check done; TxDOT and the FAA said, ‘Hey, wait, that's not aviation. You need to release it,'” Brown said.
The money will not go to the FAA, but to the Conroe-North Houston Airport budget, according to Brown.
“The FAA’s guideline is not hard and fast that says a payment must be made right away. It just says that payment must be made to the airport,” Brown said. “This item is not for the funding. It is simply to sign the letter authorizing the county judge to sign the letter so that we could submit it to the FAA to begin the land release process.”
Noack made a motion for the payment to come out of Precinct 2 Commissioner Charlie Riley’s budget, which failed in a 2-3 vote.
“Somebody would lose their job in the private sector over this,” Noack said. “This is a monumental mistake. We have to come up with $1.3 million from somewhere. We pull it out of fund balance, then we're not going to be at our status amount of money in reserves. This is a problem.”
The item was ultimately tabled by the court to allow the Montgomery County attorney’s office to figure out possible solutions to the land ownership issue and have more discussions with the FAA regarding possible alternate release agreements for the land.
The 22,000-square-foot forensic center was initially approved in 2020 after severe backlog in the previous forensic center led to delays in investigations and returns to relatives. The facility opened last October.
