Get ready to see a lot more Black Hawk helicopters flying around Flagler County’s airport in the heart of Palm Coast as a new company moves in, bringing with it almost three dozen jobs.
The Flagler County Commission on Monday in a 3-1 vote approved a 30-year lease with Van Damme Helicopters, a company that repairs and repurposes for civilian uses Black Hawks that are no longer used by the military. Commissioner Kim Carney dissented and expressed some reservations. Commissioner Leann Pennington was absent.
Van Damme Helicopters for the past seven years has operated in a 12,000 square foot facility in an industrially zoned area in Pompano Beach. It works on about a dozen helicopters a year. It’s hoping to double that volume. “I met with them several times last year,” Airport Director Roy Sieger said. “They looked at many different airports in Florida, and they finally settled: We want to come here to Flagler.”
Investing $1.5 million to $2 million in construction, the company will build a metal 150 ft. by 100 ft. hangar with associated apron, office space, a taxi lane, a driveway, a parking lot, and some additional site work. The plant is expected to create 30 jobs.
Though they have not yet been precisely calculated, the lease terms appear generous: the company will pay just $1,089 per acre per month, once its total land use is surveyed. For example, in the example provided by Sieger, if the company uses 1.43 acres, it’ll be charged $1,557 a month. The rent will increase by 3 percent a year. Sieger, who rejected Commissioner Kim Carney’s suggestion that it’s a low price, estimates the property will be an acre to an acre and a half. If it was a county-owned building, the charge would be far higher, around $10,000 a month, and it might not get leased, he said. “This model makes a great return on investment,” he said.
The company will not pay property taxes, since the facility will be built on county-owned land: that’s a substantial, hidden subsidy, though the county would also be getting the benefit of a hangar which, in 30 years, will revert to the county. The company can remain there, but “at that point they can start paying fair market value for what that hangar would cost to rent at that time,” Sieger said.
Sieger did not mention the tax benefit, focusing instead on expected economic benefits. “It is one of the biggest economic engines that our county has,” he said of the airport, adding with a little exaggeration: “It is the only airport, the only piece of property that has everything that we need, has the power, has a sewer, has the land, has the storm water. It has everything to bring businesses here.” Palm Coast’s Town center, across the street, for example, has all those benefits.
Roy Zucker, a real estate broker involved in the deal, told the commission that Van Damme Helicopters wanted to move to Flagler for two reasons: a larger space to accommodate its production, and “a better lifestyle for their employees. Their technicians, their engineers, are highly educated people. They want better schools,” Zucker said. (Curiously, Broward County schools have been B-rated like Flagler County schools until 2024, when they became an A-rated district. Flagler schools did not.)
“These are these aircraft are going to fly in and then they’re going to get taken apart and then rebuilt again,” Sieger said of the UH-60 Black Hawk, still the workhorse of the American military. “There will be some flight training with them. But the nice thing is, not flight training, like, students, it’ll be people just doing flight testing. They can fly with that within the airport property, or they’ll leave the airport.”
Sieger was speaking cautiously about training flights because the airport and local elected officials have been pummeled by some residents’ complaints about the flight school whose planes at the airport are in near-constant touch-and-go mode, aggravating nearby residents. A few residents addressed the County Commission to that effect today, though the airport is zoned industrial and pre-dates the vast majority of residential neighborhoods.
“The more planes we have, the more helicopters we have, the more that puts the population at risk,” Chantal Preuninger, who moved into her Zeppo Court house in 2022, west of the airport, told the commission. “So I would ask you to consider before you take any decisions regarding those, extension of airports or bringing more helicopters, if you can remember that we are people, and we live in that neighborhood, and take decisions that are working for us before businesses.” Preuninger said she did not know there was a flight school at the airport when she moved in. “We are more important. We live there,” she said, asking for the flight school to be relocated.
Zucker said the helicopters would not be flying in and out every day. Some sit on the ground for months as they’re being worked on.
Carney, the commissioner, said she was not opposed to the lease as a concept. She was displeased with the fact that the item appeared on the consent portion of the commission agenda–the portion that includes numerous, ostensibly routine items that all get voted on wholesale, without discussion. The item had not been part of a workshop ahead of time. Carney said she studied the 23-page lease but could not expect the public to have had that sort of understanding when the commission itself did not treat the item with more transparency. She wanted to understand the noise factor in the context of a proposed airport zoning ordinance.
“I need to understand that there’s a safety value. I need to understand that the noise level is not going to interfere with our friends and colleagues that live around us,” Carney said. “I think that a 15-minute presentation was much more in line than putting this on the Consent Agenda.” Commission Chair Andy Dance said the item would have worked better as an individual item of discussion if only to disclose the benefits of the lease to the public.
On the other hand, Tom Albano, a resident, called himself “miffed” at the resistance. “If I want to work on helicopters, airplanes, I got to do it in an airport, so I got to lease property from the airport,” he said. “I’d have to hate to jump through every who to do it. I feel bad for this realtor guy having to come up here and jump through all these hoops trying to bring a $2 million building in.”
Sieger cautioned the commission and the public: “Because we are an airport, and because we have leasable land, we can’t tell–literally, because of grant assurances–we’re really not allowed to tell businesses, aviation businesses, that they can’t come to our airport. We can’t. We’re a public-use airport.” Doing so would jeopardize the airport’s grants in the future.
He also reminded the county of an unhappy history at the airport, when the county built a hangar instead of the private company that leased it. That was the Ginn hangar, which the county built at its own expense on Ginn’s pledge to use it. Ginn went bankrupt, leaving the county holding the bag for that loan in 2010. “We were stuck with that note, almost $3.8 million, and I will tell you, I’ve been here almost 16 years. I think we just paid that note off,” Sieger said, justifying the safer approach of having a private company build a building at its own expense. If it were to go out of business, the building would remain in the county’s hands.
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