County looking for money for Johns Island runway

Kiawah Island has been doing brisk business with big spenders, but the private jets that bring them have taken a toll on the Charleston Executive Airport. The Charleston County Aviation Authority tests the strength of its runways every year, and all systems had been go at the Johns Island airport since it opened in 1945. But the Kiawah Island Golf Resort cut the ribbon on its swanky new hotel, The Sanctuary, in August 2004, and the county found serious deterioration in its annual assessment of the Johns Island strip a couple of months ago. The results prompted the authority to lower its weight restrictions at the airport, relegating some larger corporate jets -- "big iron" as they are known in the industry -- to Charleston International Airport. Now, the county is trying to drum up between $5 million and $10 million to replace the WWII-era strip. Developers and town officials from Kiawah Island met with the aviation authority last week to convey the gravity of the matter as they saw it. Kiawah hosted a big business conference 10 days ago and dozens of corporate chieftains couldn't land their jets on Johns Island. "From the state's point of view in recruiting business, these people having to go to another airport is not a good thing," said Charles "Buddy" Darby, CEO of Kiawah Development Partners. David Jennings, chairman of the aviation authority, said the county is delighted with the traffic -- after all, it collects a healthy percentage of jet fuel sales at the terminal -- but now they have serious funding "challenges". The county just garnered a $3 million grant for the Johns Island airport from the Federal Aviation Authority, but that scratch is designated mostly to extend the tarmac and make improvements unrelated to the runway. The elephant in the room is whether Kiawah interests will help pick up the tab, and whether the county will ask them to. Darby said there is a willingness on all fronts to get it done as soon as possible, but he stopped short of saying if that willingness equated to Kiawah dollars. "They would like to fix it, but there's a lot between the cup and the lip in terms of who pays for what," Darby said. Jennings said the new runway likely would be financed with government bucks, county, state and federal. But that could take a while, five years if the authority relies on the FAA alone. "If someone were to find a pot of nickels totaling $10 million, or whatever the cost is, that would be a totally different time frame," Jennings explained. "The more creative we can be, the more quickly we can finance the construction."

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