As Heath is preparing to welcome several thousand new residents who will be building hundreds of homes in the city, the owners and operators of the Licking County Regional Airport want to make a few things abundantly clear to their future neighbors.
The runway is open 24 hours a day, airplanes can be noisy, the twirling green-and-white beacon marking the runway at night is bright, and the airport is there to stay.
“We can’t shut it down, and it’s not going anywhere,” said Licking County Commissioner Tim Bubb, who said the county owns the airport and has invested heavily in it.
“We’re not against development by any means,” said Bubb, who lives in Heath and has watched the city grow up around an airport that was in the country when it was built in 1930. Heath didn’t exist until 1952.
He said he has read and heard about other communities where newcomers move near an airport and then start complaining about the noise.
“We want to get out ahead of it so that people know about the airport,” he said.
In addition to airplane noise, the commissioners and the Licking County Regional Airport Authority board want builders and homeowners to know about special “airspace” zoning that limits the height of structures in the vicinity of the runway. It also restricts water features, such as retention ponds, in the nearby landscape because they attract waterfowl. Birds in the wrong place at the wrong time can bring down an airplane.
“Developers of the Central Park project had proposed some water features, and we had to tell them ‘no,’” Bubb said.
The Central Park project is to include commercial and retail businesses, and 1,800 housing units – single-family, apartments, townhouses and assisted living. Development is planned in phases for 320 acres just north of the airport and west of the shopping complexes that include Walmart, Rural King and Target.
And housing developments are proposed to the west and east of the airport – an estimated 600 homes to the west on 225 acres of farmland along Rt. 37 that Heath recently annexed from Union Township, and 240 homes proposed along Irving Wick Drive east of Rt. 79. And preliminary discussions are underway for another housing development on about 140 acres north of Irving Wick Drive East in the same area.
If you’ve ever been shopping at Lowe’s on Rt. 79 when a small jet is taking off or landing a few hundred yards away, you get the full effect of sounds coming from a low-flying plane.
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Bubb and airport manager Elijah Snow both said that even though the airport is visible from Rt. 79, just south of Indian Mound Mall and the shopping complexes around it, some people don’t realize it’s there.
Even some people driving Heath Road don’t see it, Snow said. The road is immediately south of the airport and runs virtually parallel to the 4,649-foot runway for its full distance. It only takes a few seconds to pass by the airport, he said, so it’s understandable that if you don’t see planes, you might not know what you’re looking at.
Anyone showing up in the future to look at buying a house – especially if it’s a bad-weather day when few if any planes are flying – might not see any signs of the airport.
“We’re excited for the growth,” said Snow, a life-long Heath resident who is a pilot and the chief flight instructor at the airport. “We are heavily invested in this facility in this wonderful city of Heath. Being right off the main drag and close to so many amenities” is a great benefit for the airport and the people who use it.
But the last thing county and airport officials want, he said, is for someone to invest in a big development or a single home and then be surprised to learn that they are living next to a sometimes-noisy airport.
As Heath is growing, so is air traffic at the airport in its midst, Bubb said. The airport averaged a little more than 28 planes a day – 10,413 flights – last year.
“We’re anticipating that use of the airport could double in the next decade with all of the development going on in the western part of the county,” Bubb said.
Snow said that traffic this year is already up 10% to 15% over last year, and he said some of that is due to congestion at John Glenn Columbus International Airport.
“Someone coming in here can be almost anywhere in Newark or Heath in 10 minutes,” Snow said, and he said while it might take 10 or 15 minutes longer for a corporate executive to visit a worksite or get to a meeting in the New Albany International Business Park, where Intel is building its $28 billion computer-chip manufacturing campus, it’s still more convenient than navigating the Columbus airport.
And that speaks to one of the reasons the county has invested millions in upgrading the airport in recent years: commerce. Airports are important to economic development, Bubb and Snow said.
“Over last five to seven years, we put in new hangars for around $1 million; a new maintenance hangar at little over $1 million; a new terminal, which cost about $5 million; a new ramp area (providing parking for airplanes); and we’re currently in the process of renovating the airport lighting,” Snow said.
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Perhaps the biggest light at the airport is the beacon, which quit working a few years ago, Snow said. With the help of the Heath Fire Department’s aerial ladder truck, the airport installed a new, LED beacon atop an 80-foot, black-and-orange metal tower.
Most modern airplanes have navigation equipment that helps them find the runway, but the flashing green and white lights are especially helpful during murky weather.
“It’s really bright,” Snow said. “We don’t really receive many calls about noise, but we did get some calls about the beacon.”
Alan Miller writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.