WESTFIELD – During the Westfield Barnes Airport Commission meeting on March 11, the commission discussed marketing strategies, the fiscal year 2022 (FY22) expense budget, and updates to the Airport Noise Program.

To start the meeting, Commissioner Kate Phelon provided an update about a meeting with several of the airport’s tenants about marketing opportunities moving forward.

“We had our first marketing working group meeting with seven tenants on March 2. It was a very good meeting; all the tenants gave an update on what they do for marketing and we asked each of the tenants to provide marketing feedback for the airport. We are very excited about how the meeting went,” she said.

Airport Commission Chair William Gonet said he was happy to see the tenants working with the airport to move forward with marketing and thanked Phelon for her work so far.

“I think it is a great start, it sounds like there is a lot of working together as a team, and we can get the word out that Barnes Airport in Westfield is open for business. I’m looking forward to more healthy discussions and your continued hard work,” he said.

During the meeting, Airport Manager Chris Willenborg went through the airport’s initial expense budget for FY22 and said one of the biggest increases was for purchasing sweeper broom brushes to clear snow.

“Supplies is one account that did change a bit and we had to add in sweeper broom brushes, we had a significant winter in terms of frequency of events. We have to do snow removal if there is a half inch of slush or dry snow and that’s $20,000 for each of them,” he said.

Going forward, Willenborg added that over the next few months the airport had the opportunity to increase revenues through several avenues.

“We are trending in the right direction with our revenues. We are working to finalize the lease to get a new hangar project underway later this spring or summer. We also have other parcels we are going to put out for requests for interest so there are definitely opportunities for increased revenues,” he said.

Speaking of increasing revenues, Willenborg said during his Operational Statistics report that both operations and revenues were up in February 2020 compared to February 2019.

“Aircraft Operations were up 1 percent this month as compared to last year’s February. I was surprised we were up because we had a lot of weather in February, including high winds. Year to date we are up 5 percent. This is probably the most important part, but our airport revenues are up 11 percent year to date,” he said.

At the end of the meeting, Willenborg added that the airport’s noise program was on track to begin in April, pending a land reuse study approval from the Federal Aviation Administration and a scope of work from the project’s consultant.

“We are waiting for the final letter of approval from the FAA on the land reuse plan study. I am anticipating that we will have a project kickoff sometime next month. For the noise compatibility plan we had a scoping meeting with FAA, MassDOT, and the consultant Jones-Payne Group and I expect to get a scope of work next week and once we have that we will do a fee estimate,” he said.

The Westfield Airport Commission next meets on April 8.