Public Works Committee - Regular Meeting

Denver, it's time for this biweekly meeting of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee of Denver City Council. Join us for the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee starting now.

Alright. Good afternoon and welcome to the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. My name is Chantelle M. Lewis and I'm a council person for District 8. Today is Wednesday, May 6, and I'd like to take the privilege to tell my sister happy birthday. It's her birthday. With that, we can start with online introductions. I know we have at least one council member online, and then we'll go into the room.

Hi. Councilwoman Flora Algitres with Lucky District seven.

I think that's the only council member. So councilman? Nope. I'm hi. Diana Romero Campus, Southeast Denver District 4. Sorry. See you pop on there. Nope. That's okay. Thank you. Alright. Who are you?

I would just start with saying brave enough to face the great blizzard of twenty twenty six. Paul Cashman, South Denver district six.

Great. Thank you so much. So we just have one briefing today, and if you all can introduce yourselves and jump in.

Great. Thank you, madam chair. My name is Dave LaPorte. I'm the chief operating officer for the Denver International Airport. Our CEO, Phil Washington, is running just a little bit late. I think that he will join us here shortly. But I'm here with two of my colleagues, Chris Herndon, our Chief Commercial Officer and Jim Starling, our Chief Construction and Infrastructure Officer. We're very excited about presenting our 2026 work plan to you today. We know your time is valuable, so we'll jump right into the agenda moving forward. So our agenda today will be a brief overview of what's going on out at the airport, and we'll get right into those presentations.

We'll save a few minutes at the end if you all have any questions. So a few statistics about the airport just to kind of paint the size of how big our airport is. In 2025, we set a record with 82,400,000 passengers. That was large enough for us to be the fourth largest airport in the country and the tenth busiest in the world. We have 26 airlines that fly to and from Denver, including our three largest airline partners, United, Southwest, and Frontier.

For 2025, we have flights to two thirty six nonstop destinations, including two zero one domestic destinations, although we just announced a new route that I'll talk about here shortly, and that is to 46 states and one U. S. Territory. The new flight that was just announced is to Ruidoso in New Mexico, and that will be served by Contour Airlines. We also have nonstop flights to 35 international destinations in 19 different countries.

We are home to about 1,200 different companies that work at Denver with more than 43,000 employees. And as you know, DEN is the largest economic engine and contributes $47,200,000,000 annually to the local economy. Reflects our aspiration to emerge as the nation's preeminent aviation thought leader. Our mission underscores that we rely upon our people to accomplish our goals. We value our people a lot.

And our near term strategic plan is called Vision 100, and that is part of an overall larger strategy called Operation 2,045. Operation 2,045 is really the second phase of our strategic plan. Vision 100 will get us up to 100,000,000 passengers annually. And Operation 2,045, we expect about 120,000,000 passengers annually, and that just happens to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the airport. Vision 100 includes four different pillars.

The first one we put on there was empowering our people. Again, we value our people. Secondly, we are growing our infrastructure to be able to accommodate those loads that I spoke of. The third pillar is maintaining what we have. And finally, expanding our global connections.

And one of our goals is to get a nonstop flight to the continent of Africa. I do want to point out the upper orange or red bar up at the top. Those are our four guiding principles, and they really talk about how we guide our work or we behave while we're at work. We value sustainability and resiliency, equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility, operational excellence and enhancing the customer experience. And of course, safety falls into operational excellence.

Safety is a high priority for us. This graph shows really a timeline of what Vision January and Operation 2045 look like and how they work together. So you'll see that we expect to be at about 100,000,000 passengers in roughly 2032. And again, in 2045, we expect to be at about 120,000,000 passengers annually. Over the past couple of years, the airport has I'm sorry, achieved significant milestones.

Again, I mentioned we had 82,400,000 annual passengers last year. And when you put that into perspective, it's really remarkable because airport was originally built for 50,000,000 annual passengers. Last year, we did 82,400,000 passengers. So we're very, very busy as you all know. The Great Hall is kind of our main focus right now to accommodate that growth.

Some successes within that program, the West Security Checkpoint opened in February 2024, and I'm going to show you a little bit of what a success that was. And we reached the 50% completion mark in August, 2025. In January, we opened the Center of Equity and Excellence in Aviation with a ribbon cutting ceremony. And that again was on January 7. There are some new air service developments along with the one that I just spoke of.

Viva Aerobus inaugurated nonstop service to Monterrey, Mexico. Aer Lingus began nonstop service to Dublin. Breeze Airways began service to Providence, Rhode Island, and Turkish Airlines began nonstop service to Istanbul. We're very proud of those all of those routes. And again, I mentioned the $47,200,000,000 contributed annually to our economy.

That was really highlighted in a study that CDOT did for us, and shows that we are a significant economic contributor to this region. I mentioned the new security checkpoints and this graph does a really good job of pointing that out. ACI, Airport Council International is our trade group, one of our trade groups, and they conduct quarterly customer satisfaction surveys. And we subscribe to that and along with many other airports. Customers will rate their experience on a five point scale at each of those airports.

And this what this graph shows is that our security checkpoint scores were not great. If you remember the congestion that we had in the terminal, we had very long security lines. And then in quarter one, we opened up that West Security Checkpoint, and you can see an immediate increase on that blue line. And again, this is customer satisfaction, but almost immediately, we saw an increase in customer satisfaction. And we got a similar bump when we opened the eSecurity checkpoint.

So, our customers are telling us that they really appreciate the work that we've done and we have increased about 18% over what our scores were prior to the opening of that checkpoint. And that was the West Security Checkpoint. When we opened the East Security Checkpoint, we got another 12% bump in that score. So overall satisfaction has increased fairly significantly for us. Those are really highlighted by our customers in the categories of security wait time, ease of security screening and overall satisfaction of the airport.

So with that foundation, I'm going to turn our attention to eight really keystone projects that we have that are included in our current focus. The first of those, I talked about a little bit, it's the Great Hall program. That again is part of Vision 100 and Operation 2,045 and increases the capacity in the terminal building for our customers and our airlines. Again, I mentioned that we were built for $50,000,000 and we handled over $82,000,000 last year. We anticipate that that project will be done sometime in December 2027.

And the budget on that progress is $2,100,000,000 And I'm happy to report that that is ahead of schedule and under budget. So really good progress with that project. The next one that I would like to talk about is another one that we hear about from our customers quite a bit. That's Pena Boulevard, I feel. So this is really the section between I 70 and E 470, and we are currently in the NEPA process, the National Environmental Policy Act review for that project.

The goal of the project is really to increase our capacity in transit to the airport. We don't know exactly what that is just yet. We don't want to presuppose what a locally preferred alternative would be, But we expect that NEPA approval to be finished in or around 2028. We are going through stakeholder engagement and public scoping meetings now. We are studying alternatives and developing alternatives and then documenting that NEPA process as well. With that, I'll introduce Phil Washington. Did you want to take it from here, Phil?

Yeah. I do want to go back one slide, if I could, to the Great Hall and just comment on how we are buttoning things up. And I'm sure Dave mentioned that three distinct areas, the global Gateway, which would be on the South of the North End. So international flights, you know, you go through through the customs and all of that. That area will be what we call the global gateway.

And then we have the center of the terminal, which will be the welcome home Colorado area, a lot of Colorado centric kinds of things. And then the South end is the living room. In the living room, visitors, passengers react, relax, dine, and all of that. The key thing I wanted to mention here is we button things up. We will be doing a lot of replacing tiles that are damaged.

We will be doing a lot of two new information booths that will be in that international area. And we're buttoning up the public art, which is gonna be very, very important to the Great Hall. You've seen the renderings and you see here the tree and all of those things, but I wanted to point those things out. And you always wanna get to buttoning things up. That means you're close to completing the project.

The original schedule for opening of the Great Hall is mid twenty twenty eight. We will beat that by at least six months, where we will finish up towards the 2027, if not sooner. So really wanted to point that out, Conrad. The consolidated rental car facility, centralized rental car. I was talking to one of my the local infrastructure forefathers that had a lot to do with the planning for the airport, and he told me that the current rental car area was temporary thirty years ago.

Well, we are correcting that one of the original sins. We're atoning for that by building a consolidated rental car facility. That rental car facility is well underway with preconstruction planning. We'll be doing some design for that between 16,000, 18,000 spaces. And I think that you cannot build a consolidated rental car facility without having good transport from the terminal to the facility.

And so we are working on that transport as well, whether that is an automated people mover or something else. But we're very, very excited about this. We are looking, touring, and learning from other consolidated rental car facilities around the country. And so we'll keep you posted on that, but that's moving forward. The Sea West expansion, this is the last expansion that we can do on the existing concourses.

You know that we have expanded the other ones, you know, the outdoor patios and all of that. The C West expansion is the last one we can do on the existing concourses. This gets us and you can see the schedule here of design, and the program management team is already in place right now. It is led by a local small business minority firm priming that project. Instead of subbing it, They're priming it with a traditional prime or GC subbing to that small company.

And so we have sort of flip flopped the, know, the the order of things with regard to historically underutilized businesses. And so we're well on our way with this. This gets us to 100,000,000 passengers. This expansion with 11 new gates that will be on Sea West gets us to that number, thus vision 100 that we have put forward. And so this is a very exciting project as well.

North Terminal, we have forecast for a 120,000,000 annual passengers in 2045 when the airport celebrates its fiftieth year. In an airport, as you know, that was designed for only 50,000,000, We have vision 100, and then we have operation 2045. Operation 2045, this North Terminal expansion, is a part of that where we are focusing on what we can do to prepare the airport for that 2045. And so we need to build, and we are building this North Terminal facility, and this is that blue roofed building that you see right there. That will have additional airline counters, additional security, preparing the airport in the region for a 120,000,000 annual passengers.

We will have more international baggage and all of those. The construction timeline for this particular facility, as you see there, is 2028 to 2033. So we're gonna start this. We already have a PMT in that. We're gonna advertise that.

We already advertised that with a selection momentarily. Actually, this quarter, we will name a professional management team to do that. This facility leads to next slide. This. We have to build that blue roofed facility first so we can then build concourses coming off that facility.

Each one of these concourses would have 25 gates. The two that you see toward the bottom to the north gets us to a 120,000,000 annually. That's the $20.40

earlier with this layout.

Yes. Yes. Looks like a long walk.

Well, we're the fittest state in the country I believe so. Is what I heard.

There you go. Hey.

So we're looking

out your

colleague. We're looking out for you.

There you go.

And so we're very, very excited about this. This gets us to that number. We will build this in phases, and we do not want to build a concourse d. Right now, we have a, b, c. We don't wanna build a concourse d.

We want a walkable. The other concourses will be walkable, thus lessening the burden on the train to the concourses. And so this becomes very important. We'll build six gates first of this phased approach. Those six gates will be international gates that we will build first on this particular concourse. So we have a lot a lot planned for that. Let me ask Dave to do the baggage handling and the AGTS.

Yeah. So shortly after after 09:11, we invested a lot of money into our baggage handling system and added screening machines in the baggage handling system. Those screening machines have reached the end of their useful life, and Congress actually mandated the TSA replace those machines. So we are running that project with a grant from TSA to pay for those machines. Well, the machines are reaching the end of their original life, but so is all the conveyor that leads to those machines.

So as long as we are in doing the construction on the machines, we wanna go in and recapitalize the conveyor belt that leads up to that. And eventually baggage claims, curbside lifts, there is a lot to the baggage handling system that needs to be replaced. So we are currently in a project on the north end of our terminal right now, replacing large portions of our baggage handling system. And this will go on for several years. It's a very complex system.

And due to the phasing required, because we're still operating, it's going to be a long project for us. We currently have a contract with PCL Construction that is acting as the general contractor on that project, and we anticipate that, again, going on for at least the next five years. On the train, Phil mentioned the train. We refer to it as the AGTS or the Automated Guideway Transit System. You all know that we recently replaced some of the first cars that we had at the airport.

That was 16 cars that we replaced, and we added 10 cars to the fleet because of our growth. So we have completed an order for 26 new cars. Now we have the balance of that fleet to replace, and you have approved a contract for that. And those will start delivery sometime in 2027, and that will be completed by 2028. But cars are only half of really that equation.

There's also the guideway or the track, if you will. And we have to replace the power distribution system. Many of the switches or all of the switches will be either replaced or refurbished. The signaling system is outdated, and we have to replace the signaling system, which will ultimately allow us to run more trains in the system so we can handle the heavier loads. And because the fleet is larger than it ever has been, we have to add on to our maintenance facility where we maintain those vehicles, and that contract is moving forward, now.

So you'll see some contracts coming through city council for approval regarding those projects coming up. But this also is a multiyear, very complex project. Yes, asset management. As I mentioned, many of our assets are reaching the end of their useful life. And it's an interesting time for our airport because many of them are happening at or around the same time.

A lot of our assets are reaching the end of their life. So we have invested in our asset management program very heavily, to do condition assessments on all of our assets. We do those every five years to make sure that we understand what kind of condition our assets are in and to help inform where we want to fund replacement of assets. So that informs our capital improvement program. This will be something that we do probably forever because we want to make sure that we take a predictive approach to our assets that we want to get as much useful life out of them as we can, but we want to either refurbish or replace them right before they fail.

And that has already paid dividends with us. We started last year looking at all the underground piping of the airport. This is the first real large effort that we have done to do that. So we have sent cameras through already about 70 miles of our piping and luckily have have found that it's in pretty good condition. But it's good that we know that so that we can properly plan for the future.

The last area that we wanted to cover was the alternative energy piece. You will recall that we put out a request for information for alternative energy options. Our concern was and still is that this airport at some point can be energy independent, that the airport can go to zero emissions, which will be the first airport in the world that is zero emission. And so the idea of studying, in this case, other alternative energy options was the impetus of that request for information. We issued this RFI or request for information in December, this past December.

We closed it on March 31. We received 38 submissions from the private sector. The ideas range from what you see on the slide, battery storage, solar, small modular reactors or nuclear, geothermal, and several others from companies all over the world. We are in the process of reviewing all of those submissions. We will come back to this body and let you know how we want to proceed.

We have committed to going back out to the community and letting the community know kind of where we are, what we received, the submissions, what they're about. So we're very excited about the the response from the community, which was when I say community, I mean, world. And we believe that the interest in looking at our alternative energy at this airport. It's the first application with regards to an airport ever for really looking at alternative energy in the ways that we're looking at it. So we're very, very excited.

We think that a whole new sector or industry can be attracted to the Rocky Mount region through this effort that we've done with this request for information. That concludes our annual plan that we were asked to provide to this committee, and we are open for any questions.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the presentation. I have councilwoman Alvedras in the queue first. Would you like me to yeah. I do. You can go online.

Thank you, committee chair, and thank you to the DEN team in the room for all of this information. Definitely appreciate all of the exciting projects. Thinking about the experience, I noticed that the wait times kinda dipped down. I'm wondering if that was when we were having the TSA issues from the federal level or why the wait time experience went down in that graphic in one of the slides?

Yeah. So the experience overall has gone up based on those surveys. Let me get back to that page. It

just had like a period of time where it looked like it was going down from what I was looking at.

Yeah. So those were our summer months when we're very busy. And our our lines tend to get longer just because of the number of people moving through the airport, and that leads to customer satisfaction dips. Now it was interesting. In 2025, we didn't see it quite as severe. But, again, that's because the new checkpoints were open.

Mhmm. Great. That's good to hear. And then of all of the projects that we have going on from, you know, the car rental facility to the Great Hall? Which ones do you expect to improve the customer experience the most?

I'll start, and I'll ask Jim and and our operations chief and our commercial officer to comment as well. Actually, I think all of them. How's that for a political answer? I think I I

Gotta run for office.

Yeah. Never. But but, no, I I I really think that you have to point to the Great Hall as the one. The Great Hall, as you know, you know, had a tough beginning, you know, before our time.

Mhmm.

And we've stabilized it, and it's gonna finish ahead of schedule. So I think to answer your question, I would point to the Great Hall as the key thing because everybody goes through that. The Conrack is important too, but not everybody rents a car. But everybody goes to the Great Hall. And if I had to pick one for the future, it would be the North Terminal expansion. That one will prepare us for the next fifty years at this airport.

Amazing. And then I was at the airport recently and did struggle with wayfinding. Has that been improved at all? I mean, there was obviously the construction site keeps changing and how you can access, like, the a bridge was very challenging to find. And so I'm curious how you're managing wayfinding during this time of construction. How is it looking over there?

Yeah. I think, you know, one of the biggest challenges is to maintain that that customer path getting through the facility. We're constantly moving things around with walls. And so we have put a big focus on that. Right now, we're building a lid over that escalator at the north end when you exit the checkpoint to go across the a A bridge there. So that will improve here shortly when we remove the construction walls

and open that up.

On the concourses, we've gone through the way finding. All the signage has been updated on Concourse B. We're looking at a project to update that on a and C as well, and so that's in the works. But we're always mindful that, you know, there's people who are used to

you know, they have their same routine every time they get dropped off. They go have their same route,

and sometimes we disrupt that. And so to make sure that we have clear wayfinding so people can get through.

Yeah. I appreciate it. I know the bridge was only accessible through one side last time I was there. It was very confusing. And a lot of people like the bridge for that walkability, and I appreciate in the future not depending on the train because we all know that it goes viral every time the train is down, and so many people immediately get stuck. And it just the the amount of people that pile up in those short moments of the train being down is, you know, very troubling. It's very image troubling when people are posting it on social media, and so I'm grateful for any plans to add walkability and bridges. But lastly, my question is around the closure of Spirit Airlines. Has that caused any problems? Did they have leases at the airport?

What does that look like for the airport?

Councilwoman, no. Spirit, they they left us several years ago, so they have not flown into DEN in a while. So no impact to our operation. Although, I do wanna commend United Airlines. If you have not noticed, they have offered discounted fares for for passengers who had tickets on Spirit Airline as well as connecting with some of their employees who are no longer employed. So I did see that online and wanted to acknowledge them for that for their efforts.

Yes. I did hear that from them as well. That's great. I'm glad to hear it. Thank you for your work, and that's all I had, madam chair. Thank you for allowing me the opportunity.

Thank you, councilman. I'll address councilman Kashin.

Thank you, madam chair. On the rental facility, I was having a little bit of trouble with the map. How how far is it from the terminal? How am I getting there?

Not quite a mile from the And we are still talking with the private sector on the technology that we wanna use. We did not want to predetermine what that technology is just yet, whether it's an APM or something else. There's a number of things out there. Can you

help me out here?

The automated people mover. Okay. So that is sort of a rubber tire train in in many cases. Cases. But we will make a decision on that shortly of what that technology is, the transport.

We're calling it a common transportation system for now as we study technologies around the world to go from the terminal to the Conrack. We're blessed that it is not as far in terms of distance from the terminal as other consolidated rental car facilities are. So if you go to Los Angeles, theirs is like two miles over two miles. Midway is a couple of miles. So so ours is relatively close.

Is it envisioned in the area where the current strip of rentals are? It is. Okay. It is. So that's basic. Okay. Yep. Great. That'll be a nice addition. As far as security goes, my experience is it has totally transformed my ex experience of of Dan. For me, the long lines are gone. It's it's spiffy clean. It's quick. It's easy to navigate. Do you have any, like, data on how much it has reduced wait times, or has it? Is it just my perception?

No. It it definitely has. And that was one of the big reasons that we were so successful during the government shutdown when you saw other airports that struggled, Houston, Atlanta, and we maintain fairly short lines through that. To put a number to it, it's probably about a 30% increase in throughput. So we could so that's throughput per lane per hour. So that's up about 30%.

Yes. Okay. Great. Yeah. That's that's all I've got. I I am interested to see those new concourses, the walk walkable North concourses. Mhmm. And tell me again, what what's timeline on those?

Yes. I think we were showing through 2033 to build the processor piece. So that's the piece of the blue roof that Phil was talking about. And then we would expand from there. And the great thing about that is it's scalable. So if our traffic is way up, we can build more gates at one time or we can build less. So we would build the gates after we built that first process piece.

Is is there anywhere in I think at at one point in the past few years, it seemed like I heard some discussion about an entirely separate second terminal. Is that anywhere in the thought processes?

No. What we showed on the slide are those walkable

Right.

Concourses coming off that that facility. No. We we that is not in our master plan. Something separate and distinct Right. In term in terms of terminal.

Yeah. I think our layout's similar to Atlanta. Atlanta did build a terminal, what would be like on our north end and connected it back and forth, but we don't have that in our master plan right now. Okay.

Thank you, guys. Thank you, madam chair.

Thank you. Thank you all so much for the presentation. I do have a couple of questions that I'm I'm curious of. One of them is regarding the direct flight to Africa, and I'm just curious as to where you all in terms of your progression towards that.

Yeah. One of the thing thank you for that question, You madam know, we the ball is in Ethiopia's court. Okay. Our target was Addis Ababa.

Mhmm.

And I don't wanna speak for them, but first, initially, they had aircraft availability issues.

Okay.

And this is stemming from what was happening at Boeing. Now the Boeing issue has improved drastically now. Right? So they're back up to production levels that they were at, you know, originally. Okay. And so so that's resolved. When we last talked with them, they wanted to do Houston before Denver. And yeah. Okay. Who knows?

They are very, very close to Houston now if they're not already. Okay. And so we I I actually just speaking for myself, I see that happening within the next two to three years Okay. Of direct flight. There's some technical things that have to be worked out, perhaps a a technical stop

Mhmm.

A technical stop being refueling

Okay.

Primarily because the elevation of Addis is actually higher than Denver. Oh. And so there are some some adjustments that have to be made with regard from taking off from here. It would be hard to actually take off with a full tank and the weight of of the people in aircraft. So there's some there they probably will still be a technical stop.

We gotta figure out where that is. We were looking at a couple of places that could, you know, be technical stops, but we're very, very much aggressive on going to the Continent Of Africa. The ball is in their court. We have been talking to Ethiopian Airlines

Okay.

Which is state owned, by the way. And so when you talk to them, you talk to the Ethiopian government as well.

Okay. Well, thank you for the update. I appreciate it. I I have a question around the great Hall, but I just wanna commend you and your team on being able to get that back on track, being able to come in potentially under budget as well as ahead of schedule. I am just curious. You'd mentioned the ahead of schedule at six months. Do do you have any estimates in terms of under budget, what you all are projecting that you might have in terms of cost savings?

I do not wanna say because we've got too much time left. We've got about a year on the project. You just never know what happen. I will say this. We will be under budget.

You listen. You speak with authority. I believe you. Mhmm. Thank you for that. And then the NEPA you mentioned NEPA as well, and you were in the middle of the community engagement process. What is that What does that look like, and how long is that in terms of a timeline that you all would be engaging community?

Yeah. So we held a first public meeting earlier this year, our second meeting. So the first meeting is to go over kind of to set the stage. We've done a master plan in the past and so to talk about what we've looked at previously, what the challenges are in the corridor, get the feedback from the community. We will go back out in July for our second public meeting, and that will show different options based on our master plan, what we've heard from the public, get feedback on those as far as what's going to be the best solution for Den, the community to address the issues there.

And then we'll come back at the end of the year with the final meeting to show this is our preferred alternative and get comments back on that. Those are both in person meetings that we had. The last one was at Green Valley Ranch Rec Center. But it's also an online. And we got really good participation both online and in person.

That was my next question. And then once you have this in, I think you said at the end of the year where you would show the alternatives. Is that what you said?

Well, yeah, we'll show the preferred alternative at the end of

the year.

And what happens after that?

So at that point, we will, based on the feedback that we get, we'll take a look at whatever impacts

there

are with that option. The federal sponsor of this project is Federal Highway Administration. So at the end of that, there's a decision document that's put together that outlines exactly what the project is at that point. And so then once that is done, then we can move forward with implementing whatever the outcome is.

Whatever the preferred. Mhmm. Got it. Thank you so much for that. For the CONRAC, you mentioned that you all were in communication with other cities. Mhmm. Have you all heard anything from other c cities in terms of, like, when they've executed and implemented their CONRAX, what they've learned? And they're like, definitely don't do this or absolutely make sure you implement this.

Yes. And and I, you know, welcome my colleagues to chime in on this. I think we've heard quite a lot.

Yeah. Sure.

Quite a lot. To give you an example of one thing that we learned and and that is keeping the facility and the transport separate.

Okay.

Not putting those in as one big project. Okay. If that makes sense. Right?

Okay.

We have kept those separate, and that is a result of what we heard from other airports that are doing this. And so and one of the big reasons for keeping these things separate is transport Mhmm. Has a different sort of risk matrix attached to it if you are going to borrow money to do that, if that makes sense. Right? It has a it it it's it's sort of a moving infrastructure asset, you know, automated people mover

Mhmm.

Versus a facility itself, which is the Conrack facility itself.

Got it.

And so we have kept them separate. The facility being built on its own and the transport being done on its own. Like, literal literally separate locations? Well well, separate projects.

Okay. So just the projects, not necessarily Right. In terms of location or proximity.

That's right. Yes. Some some airports actually did both of them together as one project.

Yeah.

And the integration of both of those becomes very, very problematic. Right. Right? And so that is one huge lesson that we've learned and we're implementing as them as two separate projects. I don't know if you got another example.

I I would think a good example, if you heard us talk about this a couple years ago, we were going into it thinking we could do an all electric consolidated railcar facility. It would be the first one in the country. Feedback from industry was they weren't ready for that yet. But the lesson learned is there were other recently opened consolidated rental car facilities that just didn't have the infrastructure in place to meet that charging need. And so we will implement we pivoted from saying it's 100% electric to 100% EV capable, right? So we'll put in all the conduit and have all that in place so that when industry is ready, we can make that transition over.

One more thing too, and I don't know if mister Hernan wants to comment on this, but there's a lot of interface with the rental car companies. Yeah. And so Chris's group is having that conversation with them as well. I don't know if you wanna comment on that.

Yeah. Councilwoman, I was in Los Angeles this morning in the previous day to see LA's Conorac. It is the largest in the nation. It's 6,400,000 square feet, 21,000 spaces. And so we had an in-depth conversation how they were negotiating with the car rental companies because they are key partners in that. And and interestingly enough, there was dialogue back and forth about electric effect electrification when it came to that. So, yes, we're we're touring. I've been to Phoenix as well. We're we're looking to see all the pros and cons so that we're gonna have an exceptional piece once once we get that up and running.

Fantastic. That's great news. I'm glad you all are learning from other cities. That's fantastic. And then my final question is around the the Sea West expansion expansion, and you said you made the sub, the prime, and now the prime, the sub. How'd you work that out? Like, do you is that happen at with writing the RFP? I'm just so curious of, like, how do you have the how do you create the opportunity to expand a sub into a prime and then to have a prime a typical prime be able to support a typical sub?

We put it in the request for proposal Okay. As a requirement that a small business would lead this project

Got it.

And and that we preferred a traditional large business or traditional general contractor to sub. We did that for a couple of reasons. One is to show that small businesses can lead big projects, projects, number number one. One. Yeah. And the requirement that the larger company that is the sub would mentor

Mhmm.

The small business. So there, we've put mentor protege agreements within the RFP. So this is about writing it in the RFP and not wishing that someone will do it.

Yeah.

Right? Because, you know, if if you wish, it usually doesn't happen. Correct. And, you know, wish is not a strategy.

It just isn't. I appreciate that. So yeah. Yeah. No. That's that's fantastic because we we don't see that typically, obviously, outside of the airport when it comes to contracts. I appreciate that you all were thoughtful in that to be able to give the subs an opportunity to be able to expand because so often small businesses don't get those type of opportunities, and we keep using the larger primes because they have the capacity. Thank you for that. Those are my only questions. I don't think anyone has anything else in the queue. You good?

No. I'm good. Thanks.

Alright. So thanks. Yeah. Thanks for the presentation. With that, we have a couple items on consent six items on consent, and we are adjourned. Thank you.