SEBASTIAN — An aviation company already at the Sebastian Municipal Airport will take over a lease the city had with an insurance company in the administration building to provide class space for a flight school, the Sebastian City Council decided Wednesday night.
The lease reassignment was approved with a 4-1 vote with Councilwoman Andrea Coy dissenting. She raised concerns about the impact the flight school’s operation would have on the administration office as well as the airspace at the airport.
“I’m not happy with increasing air traffic” at the airport, Coy said, noting that there is already one flight school operating at the airport, though it is different from what Rud Aero is proposing.
NationAir Aviation Insurance, which signed a 5-year lease with the city, is half way through its term. The company has since downsized, allowing some of its staff to work from home, according to Airport Director and Community Development Director Joe Griffin.
The company no longer needed the office space it was leasing and turned to Griffin to find another company to assume its lease.
Rud Aero, which has space at the airport in one of the hangars, approached Griffin for office space for flight training. Griffin put the two companies in touch with each other and they came back to him with a proposal for the lease reassignment, he told the Sebastian City Council.
The company, which could offer flight training within its hangar space, wants the administrative space in order to better accommodate the school, according to Chief Flight Instructor Robert Schultz.
“It’s not an attractive place,” Schultz said of the company’s hangar.
Rud Aero plans to start its school with one plane, a Cessna 172, and provide FAA computer testing. Once fully operational, it would expect to have between 40 and 50 flight students and more flight instructors and planes.
Donna Wilt, a Sebastian resident, spoke in favor of the lease agreement and proposed flight school, telling the council that she, too, is a plane owner and has been involved with flight schools.
She said she sees flight training at the airport as a continuation of the airport’s legacy, having been a training airport for the military when the airport was first built.
Roseland residents Jackie James and Cy Carlson spoke in opposition to the flight school, as did two members of the Vero Beach Municipal Airport’s oversight committee. They cited concerns about lead being cast off from the planes’ fuel and impacts to the environment and the public’s health.
Despite Coy’s call to postpone a vote on the lease assignment until more homework could be done by her fellow council members, the council supported the lease reassignment. Rud Aero expects to move into NationAir Aviation Insurance’s quarters as soon as the insurance firm moves out.
