Record crowds in May, June and July. A $40m terminal four years old and already tight. A list of projects the county has been carrying since its last master plan. And a noise program trimmed before it began.
For Oakmont and Kenwood, Charles M. Schulz–Sonoma County Airport is simply the airport: up Highway 12, north on 101, and no part of the Bay Area touched. It is having the busiest year in its history. The county’s own count puts 95,732 passengers through the terminal in July, the highest month on record, after 92,759 in June and 86,537 in May. Through July the total stands at 505,157. Last year was itself the record, at 780,637, which is six-tenths more than the 488,179 of 2019, the last full year before the pandemic. Growth of that order has consequences for a terminal, a parking lot and a set of neighbors, and the county has now begun to say so out loud.
The terminal is the odd part. It is new. The county broke ground in November 2020 on what its project page budgeted at $31m — $23.8m of it in Federal Aviation Administration grants, $7.5m from airport revenues and the fees added to every ticket — and by the time the Board of Supervisors cut the ribbon on the finished front entrance in August 2023 it was calling the job a $40m one. It added some 27,000 square feet, four boarding gates, a two-lane security checkpoint and two baggage carousels. Behind it sits a $17m state infrastructure loan the county took in 2018 for terminal work, the design of “future improvements” and about 490 long-term parking spaces. Four years on, the passenger count has grown by a quarter, and the airport is back at the drawing board.
The drawing board, in this case, is the Sonoma County Aviation Commission, an advisory body of nine that meets at eight in the morning on the third Thursday of every other month in the airport manager’s office on Airport Boulevard. Its August 20 agenda carried a discussion item titled “Landside Planning Concepts” — landside being everything at an airport that is not runway, taxiway or apron — and the Press Democrat, which covered the meeting, reported that the airport manager, Jon Stout, described a fifteen-year program coordinated by the consultants Mead & Hunt: a consolidated rental-car facility, changes to parking, road improvements, new hangars and the relocation of airport offices, some thirteen potential projects around the terminal, most without adopted phasing or funding. The agenda itself contains no figures, and the minutes are not yet posted. The airport’s standing master plan, the 2030 plan whose environmental review dates from 2011, already lists a “replacement airline passenger terminal” among the projects for the following twenty years, alongside moving the fire station and the control tower to the west side of the field. Its short-term projects — lengthening the main runway by 885 feet to 6,000, and the crosswind runway by 200 — were done a decade ago.
What is actually under construction is less grand. Apron C, where the airliners park, load and refuel, is being rebuilt and widened from four aircraft positions to six, a $5.7m job paid for by the FAA and awarded to Granite Construction in January 2025 with completion due this fall. Next in line, according to the Press Democrat, are a wildlife-exclusion fence and pavement preservation on another part of the apron, both headed to the Supervisors on September 15.
The airlines, meanwhile, keep arriving. Southwest began flying from the airport in April, to Burbank, San Diego, Las Vegas and Denver, with Denver going to five days a week this month and Austin to follow in October. Alaska Airlines, the carrier that brought scheduled service back to the field and still the largest there, will add Boise, Phoenix and Salt Lake City from November 1 on 76-seat Embraer 175s — seasonal, through April — which takes its nonstop map to twelve cities. American is the third. Avelo, the budget carrier that once based aircraft at the airport, flew its last Sonoma County flights on August 11 last year. Supervisor David Rabbitt’s case for all this was that it spares residents the drive to the Bay Area airports; for a valley reader, the relevant fact is that Phoenix, Palm Springs and Boise are now, or will shortly be, a single flight from Santa Rosa.
More aircraft is also the problem. The airport’s noise abatement program dates from 1988. In January 2024 the FAA introduced new departure procedures, and complaints over the following year rose by between 200% and more than 600% over 2023, as CBS Bay Area reported last February — from Sebastopol, Occidental and the lower Russian River, places that had never heard much of the airport before. Supervisor Lynda Hopkins called it “a sharp uptick in noise complaints”. None of this is over the valley, which sits east of the field and out of the argument; it is a west-county grievance, and it is being handled as one. The county hired Cignus, an airspace consultancy, for an approach feasibility study and held a community workshop in Sebastopol in October 2024. By June the commission was discussing a “Fly Quiet” program and two candidate procedures, a visual approach to Runway 14 and an alternative to an existing arrival route. On August 20 it took action on both. By the Press Democrat’s account, a $415,000 noise package went in and a smaller one came out: four elements — quiet hours, a scoring system for the airlines, a community roundtable, and flight tracking with complaint management — with contract costs capped at $80,000, plus a 5–1 vote recommending up to $270,000 for a third phase of procedure design by Cignus. The airport’s own neighbor site says only that it is “exploring the development of an alternate approach to Runway 14”, and that airlines receive monthly reports of the complaints against them. The Supervisors have the last word on the money.
So the position, as of this week: a record year, an airport whose last expansion is four years old, a long list of projects that is a list, a construction program that amounts to an apron and a fence, and a noise program with its budget already cut. The commission meets again on October 15. The Board of Supervisors takes up the apron and the fence on September 15, and, if the commission’s recommendations travel, the noise money with them. The valley will feel none of the noise and all of the flights, which is the comfortable end of an airport to live at.
Sources: the airport’s own passenger numbers and neighbor program; the county’s releases on the terminal, Apron C and Alaska’s new routes; the Aviation Commission agendas of June 18 and August 20; the 2030 master plan project list; the IBank loan record; the Sonoma Valley Sun on Southwest; ABC7 on Avelo; CBS Bay Area on the noise complaints; and the Press Democrat, whose reporting of the August 20 commission meeting is attributed as such above — the minutes of that meeting are not yet posted. Corrections: [email protected].