Venice weighs master plan for municipal airport

Well, the Venice Municipal Airport has been part of the community since the early 1940s. First opened as the Venice Army Air Base, and today it's a small airport where private planes come and go, fly in and out. But as the city looks towards its future here with their new master plan, at least updating it, they've gotten a lot of attention from the community. As Fox 13's Kimberly Quezon reports, tomorrow a workshop will be held to help decide what comes next. The Venice Municipal Airport has been working its way through the master plan update process for the last several months. It was last updated 15 years ago. The update is done to evaluate activity at the airport, which has increased to about 116,000 touchdowns last year alone. It's also done to modernize aging infrastructure like hangars and the administration building, which the FAA calls a terminal. It also aligns the airport with FAA and DOT guidelines. This process has really gotten mixed reactions from the public, with many concerned that it could bring more commercial traffic and noise to the Venice community. But the city says everything they are doing is to be compliant with the FAA. This is something that just we have to do to remain compliant, but we have no intentions of this becoming a commercial airport. This is not going to be Sarasota or Punta Gorda or Fort Myers. This is still going to be a municipal airport, where it's basically for, you know, your general pilots, you know, that have a little plane like the ones behind us. The city says there are no plans for commercial airline service. While they are looking to increase hangar capacity, the hangars will not be for jets. The city is looking to bring a digital tower to the airport. It's made up of cameras that broadcast to a ground-level room. Residents have concerns that this could forever change the Venice they know. When I moved in, it was a small airport, little private planes, individuals in prop planes. Now, I don't know if you can see this, but there's jets lined up back there. They were never part of the original master plan. So the master plan that is being developed will guide the development of the airport. But there's a ton of work that's happening now on the airport with expansions. And that's just not right. An airport workshop will be held tomorrow morning at 9 at Council Chambers. There is a community protest planned before the meeting at 8:30. Two additional public workshops will be held on October 28th and December 2nd for the community to give their thoughts. The master plan is expected to be submitted by the first of the year. From Venice, Kimberly Quezon, Fox 13 News.