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The Fort Worth City Council was presented with plans from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport to borrow up to $3 billion this year and up to $9 billion for the next four years for various construction projects.
During the March 31 work session, Brian Butler, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport executive vice president and Chief Financial Officer, addressed the plans with council members.
Fort Worth City Council will vote on the request at the April 28 meeting, he said.
What’s happening?
Butler said some of the major projects at DFW Airport are the new Terminal F, the expansion at Terminal C and redoing International Parkway, which includes removing the left-hand turn lanes.
“Whenever we're looking to issue debt, it does require the city of Fort Worth to improve the issuance of that debt. We've also been working to modernize our bond ordinances,” said Butler, who was at his first Fort Worth meeting.
He replaced Chris Poinsatte, who retired after 22 years with the airport on March 24.
Butler said that with inflation, staff is expecting the costs to go up on remaining projects that are planned out to fiscal year 2029-30.
Zooming in
Between fiscal years 2024-25 and 2029-30, DFW Airport's capital improvement program plans to spend $11.3 billion on all aspects of the airport. That covers:
The largest portion of the spending, $3.2 billion, will be in fiscal year 2025-26, according to documents.
Russell Selkirk, DFW Airport vice president of treasury management, spoke to council members about updating ordinance language for the first time since 2010.
He said DFW Airport would authorize issuing between $2 billion and $3 billion in bonds in June, if approved by the Fort Worth and Dallas city councils, both registered owners of the airport. Then, the bond sale would happen in August or September.
Selkirk said an additional change would be the 74th supplement bond ordinance, which would increase the Series 1 Commercial Paper program from $750 million to $1.5 billion. For the Series 2 Commercial Paper program, the amount would increase from $600 million to $1 billion and add the ability to issue taxable and tax-exempt bonds.
“We're trying to introduce additional flexibility and ensure the most efficient cost of funding that we can obtain is by increasing the amount of interim funding capacity that we have,” he said. “We use commercial paper to support capital spend in between our long-term debt issuances.”
Selkirk said he expects peak spending to be $200 million a month for capital projects. He said the annual debt service would increase to about $1.3 billion, about double what it is now, due to the construction projects.
What else?
Omar Elbagalati, DFW Airport’s assistant vice president of code, construction and survey, talked about removing the need to hire a third-party special inspection. Amending that ordinance would get rid of duplications, he said.
He said in a typical setting, you have the owner, the city code department and the contractor. Elbagalati said DFW Airport serves the role of owner and code department, having its own inspectors on staff. A third-party does the inspection and then he said his department will reinspect what the third party's work.
He said having 85 active construction projects, using a third-party inspector and the wait to be scheduled for inspections could lead to delays.
