MT. COMFORT — Indiana State Police plans to move its aviation division from Indianapolis Regional Airport in Mount Comfort to Greenwood next spring.
The state police agency has subleased a hangar at Indianapolis Regional Airport, formerly called Mount Comfort Airport, since 2014. The aviation division was previously housed at Indianapolis International Airport.
Officials with the city of Greenwood agreed to spend $2.5 million on a 12,000 square-foot hangar at Indy South Greenwood Airport. The Indianapolis suburb and ISP signed a long-term lease agreement that also includes 4,000 square feet of office space for 12 to 20 state police employees, including a SWAT team.
The state police’s aviation division has several aircraft, including helicopters and small planes. According to an article in Collective Magazine, a national news source for helicopter aviation, ISP purchased its first new helicopter this past March for the first time in 25 years. The aviation division first began in 1947.
Capt. Dave Bursten, chief public information officer for ISP, said state police officials decided to move forward with a lease at the Greenwood airport rather than Indianapolis Regional because the aviation division will be able to grow into a new building. It also will have better amenities, he said, such as sleeping quarters.
ISP Superintendent Doug Carter said the department also chose Greenwood because of its proximity to Interstate 65 and downtown Indianapolis. He said the city, located south of Indianapolis, is an ideal centralized location. He said aircraft can get anywhere in Indiana in an hour or less from Greenwood.
“Top of the list is this is an ideal location with nearly all the
infrastructure in place to meet our operational needs to serve not only state police aviation needs, but the needs of our law enforcement partners across the state,” Carter said in a news release.
Ryan Maxfield, general manager of Indy Jet, the private company overseeing operations at Indianapolis Regional Airport, argued that Mt. Comfort is better for the aviation division from a facility standpoint. He pointed out that the airport has longer, wider and more runways than Greenwood — two runways compared to just one — and also better safety factors for inclement weather as well as instrumentation technology.
Maxfield said ISP gave Indy Jet an opportunity to submit a proposal to keep the aviation department there, but added that it was “impossible” to do that without a guaranteed local subsidy like that offered by Greenwood.
The Greenwood Redevelopment Commission agreed to spend nearly $1.2 million to build the hangar, and the city will use about $1.3 million from available airport improvement projects.
State police will lease the hangar from Greenwood for about $5,000 a month and also pay $2,500 a year in maintenance costs. The initial lease is for six years, but both the city and ISP expect the partnership to extend beyond that. The city designed the lease to recapture the costs of building the hangar over about 48 years.
“We are not looking to make a profit on this project. The expected life of a building like this is, at minimum, 50 years,” said Greg Wright, controller for the city of Greenwood.
Maxfield said Indy Jet couldn’t afford to build a new hangar without a receiving a good return on investment or without asking local officials to buy into a multimillion-dollar project to keep the aviation division in Hancock County.
ISP’s lease at Indianapolis Regional expires at the end of March, Maxfield said. It’s unclear how long the state police will remain in Mount Comfort. The new hangar expects to open by the end of spring 2019. Maxfield said the airport could work with ISP on a month-to-month lease before the four-year lease runs out.
“We really loved and appreciated having the state police here. We considered them part of our airport family. We know that all of the pilots enjoyed the facility and level of service that we pride ourselves in,” Maxfield said.”We wish them the best of luck, and we’re sad to see that they are leaving this airport that we thought supported their operations so well.”
