Tracy Press

A Cessna lines up over Tracy Boulevard for a landing at Tracy Municipal Airport on Friday. The same runway, when used for takeoffs in prevailing winds, launches planes over what would be the Ellis subdivision off Linne and Corral Hollow roads. Glenn Moore/Tracy Press

It’s yet another sign that some airport proponents feel city officials neglect what they see as an underused jewel of an airport in south Tracy.

But that attitude puzzles people such as Rod Buchanan, the interim head of the parks department who oversees the airport. He pointed out that Tracy has hired a full-time employee to manage the airport and pumped more than $1 million into it in the past few years — with the federal government paying more than $924,000 of that.

"We want to bring more activity at the airport," Buchanan said.

Still, for pilot, mechanic and airport association board member Denny Presley and some others who use the airport, the proposed subdivision and water park are no ordinary threats to what goes on at the airport — or to what might take place there in the future.

The biggest problem that Presley sees is that homes and the water park will be built in restricted air space under the flight path of their airport’s main runway.

Homes are the enemy of little airports such as Tracy Municipal.

The city is trying to negotiate a deal with builder Les Serpa of The Surland Cos. that will give him the rights to build 2,250 homes northwest of the airport — and another 1,600 somewhere else in the city — in exchange for 21 acres of land and a $20 million Surland donation to the city so it can build a water park.

But more people near the airport are the last thing pilots want to see — because the last thing homeowners want to see and hear are low-flying airplanes buzzing over their rooftops.

"We don’t like it," said Eric Rode Olsen of Skyview Aviation, a concessionaire that runs a flight school at the airport.

Skyview wrote a letter to the city asking officials to keep in mind that the business hopes to one day open a restaurant there and has contracts starting in 2009 to bring in 30 new students annually who will likely live in Tracy while they learn to fly, an economic boost to the city.

Also, like many pilots at the airport, Skyview officials hope that the city will one day lengthen its main runway another 450 feet so about half the corporate jets and turbo-propeller planes in existence can land there, instead of the roughly 10 percent to 20 percent of those aircraft that the airport can handle now.

Corporate jets would mean big business for the airport, Presley says.

But there are physical obstacles at the 300-acre airport that would make paving another 450 feet of runway a very expensive job.

The airport has two runways, a main strip that runs northwest-southeast, and another that runs east-west.

Any runway extension west of the airport would run into the Delta Mendota Canal, and east of the property is Tracy Boulevard, and farther east, a gravel pit that would have to be filled in before more the city paves more runway.

And the city would have to buy out businesses if the city juts the main runway northward.

In any case, Buchanan sees it unlikely that Tracy could out-compete other airports for federal grant money to build longer landing and take-off strips, given the expense.