By Catalina Gaitán / The Seattle Times
MONROE — As Mayor Geoffrey Thomas puts it, Monroe’s First Air Field has long been a key part of the city’s spirit.
Since 1967, the 36-acre expanse of open greenery, six large airplane hangars and unusually short and narrow runway have attracted a motley crew of aviation hobbyists and tinkerers and embraced expert and beginner pilots alike.
Decades-old fixer-upper planes — some of them fabric-covered — fill hangars across the Evergreen State Fairgrounds. Many who rent hangars there have never trained at a formal flight school, opting to take lessons from certified instructors who work on their own planes at the airfield.
The airfield’s previous owner, Daryl Habich, who bought the airfield in 1977, would often sit outside and watch the planes take off and land as he smoked a cigarette, recalled Crystal Woodward, a pilot. Habich ran his own dental clinic on the property, sometimes having his clients fly in for their appointments.
Just like the city, Thomas said, the airfield is a place “where everybody feels at home and where everybody feels they belong.”
But after nearly 60 years of smooth sailing, the airfield faces major turbulence.
Habich, who died at 77 in 2022, left the airfield to his children after he put the property up for sale for $6 million in the 2000s. He had tried to sell it for health and financial reasons, but hoped it would remain an airfield, he told The Daily Herald in 2009.
Instead, Habich’s family is negotiating a sale of the airfield to the Snohomish County Public Utility District for over $7 million so it can be torn down and redeveloped into a 56,000-square-foot office building with separate structures for warehouse and storage.
Members of Habich’s family did not respond to multiple interview requests. The negotiation has been underway for two years, and there is no estimate for when the sale will close, said Maureen Barnes, real estate services manager for the utility district.
The new facility is needed to keep up with the area’s skyrocketing energy demand, Snohomish County officials said, as more people move into the area seeking affordable housing outside Seattle.
But Thomas and pilots who have rented hangars at First Air Field for years are bracing for the loss of their community and its do-it-yourself culture.
“Yes, it’s had a private component, but it’s also a public good,” Thomas said. “A place that helps keep us connected — not a place with a 6- or 8-foot-high fence that keeps us out.”
‘We just want to fly’
On a blustery Friday afternoon, four pilots perched on stools in Edward Haynes’ hangar at First Air Field, sipping from tiny cardboard cups of espresso made by a worn plastic machine in the corner.
Protected from rain dripping beyond the massive open doorways loomed a 1963 Piper Cherokee 235, a four-seat plane that Haynes, 51, of Snohomish, has been fixing up since buying it for less than $70,000 last year.
Haynes, like his friend Tate Doolittle, 36, of Carnation, and Crystal, 36, and Brendan Woodward, 40, both from Everett, had found a home at Monroe’s humble airstrip.
Most had nursed an interest in flying but didn’t want to take the conventional — and expensive — route of enrolling at a nearby flight school, where they said instructors tend to be overworked and students get funneled toward becoming commercial pilots.
But at First Air Field, they said, anyone curious about aviation — regardless of funds or level of experience — is welcome to learn.
“I stopped by just to see what it was all about, and I was in an airplane 15 minutes later having my first lesson,” Doolittle, a student pilot who has been training at the airfield for about a year and a half, said while bouncing his 15-month-old son, Cullen, on his knee.
If the airfield is sold, pilots and mechanics who work there would face waitlists of up to five years to park their planes in hangars at the nearest airfields such as Harvey Field near Snohomish and Everett’s Paine Field. And without a storage space, some of the aircrafts would be too damaged to fly after months sitting in the rain.
If the airfield closes, Doolittle said, he will have to give up flying — a passion he said he inherited from his father.
“The unique part about this field is the vast majority of us here, we just want to fly.”
Snohomish County’s growing pains
Mark Flury has a dilemma.
As a pilot, although he has never used First Air Field, Flury said he understood the desire to keep the property the way it is.
But as a senior manager of the Snohomish County PUD, Flury said the area’s increasing energy demands leave little time to waste.
The district is the second-largest public power utility in the state, Flury said, providing electricity to nearly 380,000 households and businesses and growing by about 7,000 per year.
Snohomish County saw its population swell to 828,000 in 2020 — over 110,000 more than in 2010.
To keep up with increasing demand, the PUD’s five offices — all of which were built by the 1960s — desperately needed an upgrade, Flury said.
The new facility at the site of First Air Field would consolidate and replace two small offices in Snohomish and Monroe, allowing the district to handle more customers and store more supplies needed for emergencies.
The new building could accommodate 70 employees and up to eight crews — 20 more employees and four more crews than the two existing offices combined, Flury said.
The district did consider about 10 other properties, county officials said, including one in the Dutch Hill area a few miles from Snohomish.
But the airfield has easy access to Highway 522 and U.S. 2. The land is also off the flood plain, meaning crews wouldn’t get trapped by flooding during the heavy rains the area sees in November and December, Flury said.
If the sale goes through, Flury said, the county plans to help pilots at First Air Field find hangars elsewhere.
“The history of the site is important, but for us it’s really about finding a place that’s a good spot for our crews and a good spot for future growth for the county,” utility spokesperson Aaron Swaney said in a late August phone call. “We have to meet that growth and we have to have facilities that can do that.”
Mayor Thomas agreed the county was growing fast. But he criticized the PUD for selecting First Air Field, a property zoned for tourism and commercial purposes.
According to the city’s municipal code, governmental facilities like public works storage facilities and administrative buildings are allowed on that land. But Thomas said the spirit of zoning was to develop the land in ways that draw people to Monroe and tie the community together, such as a new trail system or public park.
Thomas said he shared his concerns with the agency two years ago, but it moved forward anyway.
“I’m concerned about it becoming an area where equipment is going to be stored and an office building,” he said. “The intent wasn’t to have something closed off to the community.”
Flury said the district is working on including spaces within the proposed office building that would welcome Monroe residents, such as a community room that could be rented out by the Boys & Girls Club or a local scout group.
The future of First Air Field
Pilots at First Air Field can easily rattle off ideas for restoring the facility to its former glory.
The owners could “condo-ize” the hangars by selling them at $50,000 apiece, Brendan Woodward said. Pilots say the owners could sell airplane fuel and convert one of the property’s two vacant buildings into a flight school.
And the appetite for airplane hangars is so ravenous, the pilots say, that if the owners cleared those being used as storage or for parked RVs, the spaces would be snapped up the same day.
If the airfield does close, it would be among a growing number of public-use airports to close across the United States over the past several decades. There were about 5,200 public-use airports in the United States in 2022 compared with nearly 5,600 in 1990, federal data shows.
A silver lining is that the PUD would not start redeveloping the property for several years, giving pilots who rent hangars there enough time to get on waiting lists at other airfields, said Brad Schuster, of Kirkland, a spokesperson for national aviation lobbying group the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association.
But Schuster said trying to persuade the airfield owners to preserve the property instead of selling it would be a “steep climb.”
“I’ve talked to a few members and pilots there, and they are considering some strategies that they’re hoping will be effective,” Schuster said.
For now, the First Air Field community members continue to fly, work on their planes and welcome in strangers. The loss, they said, wouldn’t just affect them. It would be a “chipping away” of Washington’s legacy of aviation, Haynes said.
“I’ve made some of my best friends here learning how to work on a plane and learning how to fly,” Haynes said. “It’s just sad to see it go and be another forgotten-about airport that was a really special place.”
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