Sunday, July 12, 2015

Upper Limit Aviation talks tanks with Parowan, Utah

PAROWAN – Upper Limit Aviation officials said they are in talks with the city of Parowan over the possibility of leasing fuel tanks at the Parowan Airport to store excess fuel.

The growth of operations for ULA in Cedar City has led to the need for more fuel and storage, said Scott Jolley, ULA’s director of community and business relations.

“In our efforts in Cedar City with all of our operations and the items that we deal with, (we are pushing) to be more efficient, we are in the process of self-fueling on the airfield in Cedar City and as we have looked at the options available to us, we wanted to open a discussion with Parowan to look at leasing the fuel tanks on the Parowan Airport,” Jolley said.

Jolley said the aviation company would simply store fuel in Parowan and pick it up via trucks and haul it to Cedar City Airport to refuel aircraft there.

Jolley said ULA would pick fuel up between flight blocks, which are launched every two and a half hours.

“That would give our fuel crew ample time to drive to Parowan to fill the mobile refuelers and get back to Cedar and fill the aircraft,” Jolley said. “The way it would work to protect the Parowan airport is that we would lease the tanks and meter all of the fuel that Parowan Airport needs into their mobile refuelers and sell that fuel back to Parowan at whatever our invoice cost is.”

Jolley said ULA anticipates the volume of fuel consumed by the aviation firm would help bring Parowan City’s fuel costs down.

“We can’t come up with a downside here,” Parowan Mayor Don Landes said regarding a potential partnership with ULA. “It looks like a win-win for the city.”

Parowan Councilman Ben Johnson expressed concern with the current condition of the tanks.

“Our tanks are not in the greatest shape right now,” he said. “But that could be a good thing if the fuel is turned over. A lot of people don’t come here because our fuel isn’t recycled very often. So there is two sides to that coin. This does, however, give us an opportunity to put some money aside and improve the tanks.”

“This is an avenue for us to reduce our fuel costs,” Johnson continued. “Hopefully, it could help us attract more planes to our airport.”

City officials will take the next two weeks to finalize the specifics of a possible lease agreement and present it to the City Council for a vote on July 23.

Source:  http://www.thespectrum.com


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