Following runway sale, what’s next for the Marion airport?

City and county entities are working through potential zoning, land use implications of the recent sale.

The city of Marion completed a runway-expansion project at the city’s airport in 2020. The runway has since been transferred to private ownership. (Courtesy LuxAir)

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MARION — Following the summer sale of the Marion airport runway to a private company, a bevy of private and public stakeholders are turning their focus to what’s next for the airport and the land surrounding it.

The city in June finalized the sale of the runway to 530 Investments, a Springville-based LLC registered to Peg Morris, for $500,000 to minimize future municipal investment into the airport in light of more pressing city priorities.

The rest of the airport was already owned by another private aviation company, LuxAir Aviation, so the sale marked a transition to completely private ownership for the facility located off Highway 151 in far east Marion.

The sale process was not without turbulence, however. The city could not originally identify a buyer through its first round of request for proposals, and it later took 530 Investments' low bid in the name of maintaining airport operations.

“The desired goal was to save this runway and (therefore) save the airport,” Marion City Manager Ryan Waller said at the time. “This lets us do what we had hoped to do.”

If a buyer had not been identified, the city planned to shut the runway as soon as June 30 of this year — a move that effectively would have halted all flights to and from the airport. Now that the runway’s future has been secured, attention turns to what’s next.

A small aircraft takes off from the runway at the Marion Airport in Marion on July 25, 2017. (The Gazette)

Airport owners looking into planned unit development

Earlier this month, a group of investors in the airport and the nearby AirCom Commercial Park approached the city of Marion to update portions of city code relating to the airport, its overlay district and the future land use map.

That group included 530 Investments, LuxAir, AirCom Caves, JJL Aviation, Abode Construction and Genesis Equities.

Some of the changes were necessary since the existing code language related to public ownership of the runway, while other requested changes related to the group’s plans for future land use around the airport.

The group asked the city to rezone 115 acres around the runway to allow a planned unit development, which makes it easier to mix different types of land uses in a given area.

Representative Hannah Kustes said the rezoning was sought to better align the city’s future land use and zoning maps with the group’s goals for the land around the airport. Kustes is vice president and chief financial officer at Abode Construction, as well as co-owner in LuxAir Aviation.

“Really what we’re looking to accomplish out there is a little bit more of a mix of smaller commercial lots that allow for business sizes closer to an acre or an acre and a half that can give us a mix of commercial or retail type uses,” Kustes said.

Kustes said the Marion airport is unique in that it is small enough for private pilots to use for leisure travel while still being close enough to larger cities like Cedar Rapids and Iowa City to act as a connector to the broader Corridor.

That opens the door, she said, for the land around the airport to support a mix of commercial businesses like restaurants, flexible office spaces and/or storage businesses to serve a distinct mix of leisure travelers, small-scale business traffic and general aviation enthusiasts.

“There’s very few places that you can fly into that have this really unique environment where you feel like you still get some sort of walkability,” she said. “A lot of airports are either quite rural … or they’re more of a commercial type of airport” that would be too busy for these kinds of surrounding land uses.

The exact mix of businesses will be dependent on market demand, but Kustes said the rezoning — approved last week by the Marion City Council — will allow for more effective marketing in attracting interest in the area.

The council also has issued two rounds of approval to changes in the Marion airport land use and overlay zoning regulations to simplify permitted land uses, although one more round of approval is needed for that move to be final.

County considers revisiting airport overlay district

Linn County also is considering implications from the sale and whether it should impact the partnership between the county and the city as it relates to the zoning and permitting process for unincorporated Linn County land around the airport.

As is, the county and the city have a 28E agreement through which all building permit applications within the airport's overlay zone are forwarded to the city of Marion for review.

The overlay area is split into five zones based upon their distance from the airport, among other factors. Zones A, B, and C — closest to the municipal airport — have the most restrictions in terms of land use and building heights, while Zones D and E have fewer restrictions.

The agreement was approved in 2020 to comply with grants awarded by the Department of Transportation to reconstruct the airport runway while it was under city ownership. Now that the runway is privately owned, county leaders are questioning if that agreement should be altered.

The Linn County Board of Supervisors discussed the matter informally this week, and several landowners from around the airport attended the meeting to urge supervisors to reevaluate the current agreement in light of the shift to private runway ownership.

Linn County Board of Supervisors Vice Chair Kirsten Running-Marquardt (from left), Chair Brandy Z. Meisheid and Sami Scheetz listen to a public comment during the Linn County Supervisors public hearing at the Jean Oxley Public Service Center in Cedar Rapids on Aug. 25. (Savannah Blake/The Gazette)

“There is a decision that this board can make,” Charlie Nichols, director of planning and development for Linn County, told the board. “You could decide to not do anything. ... You could update the ordinance to match the changes the City of Marion is making ... or you could look at more significant changes.”

Should the county opt to change its current airport overlay zoning district regulations, those changes would first go to the county’s Planning & Zoning Commission for review. The commission would then make a recommendation to the Board of Supervisors, who would host a public hearing on the matter.

No formal meeting date has been set for those discussions, although supervisors this week expressed a general interest in revisiting the topic in the future.

Comments: grace.nieland@thegazette.com

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