When the St. George Regional Airport opened its gates in 2011, Airport Manager Rich Stehmeier said local leaders never could have imagined how quickly it would take off.
“In 10 years, it grew what we thought would take 30 years to do.”
Passenger traffic more than doubled from 2013 to 2023, when it served nearly 300,000 people. It’s one more example of southwest Utah’s growing pains, as Washington County’s population climbs past 200,000 people and millions of tourists descend on the area each year.
That’s why the airport asked the Utah Legislature to set aside $15 million in this year’s budget to build its first air traffic control tower — and got the money.
“Any time that you get that kind of support from the state, that's just amazing,” Stehmeier said. “And, you know, it just couldn't have come at a better time.”
Currently, flights in and out of St. George are controlled remotely by Federal Aviation Administration staff in southern California, so he said having a tower on site will help passengers fly more safely and with fewer delays as southwest Utah’s skies grow more congested.
In January, the city brought Gov. Spencer Cox to the airport as part of its effort to drum up support for the state funding, but at the time it wasn’t clear if the Legislature would be able to find room for the project in its 2024 budget. Part of the local contingent advocating for the state funds during that visit was leadership from SkyWest Airlines, a company based in St. George that operates flights through the airport.
“The growth here has in some ways outpaced some of the infrastructure, including the airport infrastructure,” SkyWest spokesperson Marissa Snow said. “[The tower] really has become a critical need even for what's happening today to keep the airport and our flights safe on a daily basis.”
The airport runs between eight and 14 commercial flights per day, Stehmeier said, but the total climbs to 250 daily takeoffs and landings when you include all private and corporate flights. Based on examples from airports in other cities, such as Provo, he said the new tower should allow the St. George airport to handle double or triple that amount of traffic in the future.
So, what are the next steps now that St. George has the state funding? First, the airport needs federal approval for where to put the tower.
In recent weeks, the FAA visited to study five potential tower sites and see which one has the best visibility. To do that, the agency had an air traffic controller stand at each site wearing a virtual reality headset — one of the first times the FAA has studied tower locations that way, Stehmeier said.
“They could actually look in the goggles, set themselves up at 70 feet in the air and look out their windows of the virtual tower to see exactly what they were going to see at our airport.”
The FAA is expected to approve the tower location within a few months, Stehmeier said. In the meantime, the airport is finalizing its design and doing an environmental impact analysis so it can be ready to begin construction once it gets the green light. He expects the project should break ground by late summer or fall and take around 18 months to build, which would put its likely completion date in the first part of 2026.
The airport’s preferred tower location would place it west of the terminal around the halfway point of the main runway. One advantage of that spot, he said, is that the ground there is already 28 feet higher than the runway so the tower wouldn’t need to be as tall.
That can have a big impact on the budget, Stehmeier said, because each additional foot of height on a tower can cost up to $150,000 to build.
“When you talk about costs … every 10 feet is a million dollars or a million and a half. So yeah, you start getting up there.”
When it’s done, the tower will be around 100 feet tall at its highest beacon and the FAA staff working inside will stand around 70 feet off the ground. Early renderings of the tower envisioned it as an octagon, but Stehmeier said local building codes may require it to be designed as a four-sided building instead.
He anticipates the tower’s total cost to be around $16 million, paid for entirely by the state money and funds the airport collects from usage fees. Because of the structure’s location, he said, the construction shouldn’t impact passengers.
For southwest Utah residents, the tower could also open the door to new destinations. Some airlines are hesitant to fly into an airport that doesn’t have its own tower, Stehmeier said, so he expects this project will make it easier to attract more flights. For instance, the airport hopes to eventually meet local demand for routes to West Coast cities like Los Angeles and Seattle.
Currently, SkyWest operates flights from St. George to Salt Lake City, Denver, Phoenix and Dallas for United Airlines, American Airlines and Delta Airlines. Especially with the tower now officially on its way, Snow said the company doesn’t expect the city’s or the airport’s growth to slow down anytime soon.
“We're constantly evaluating potential routes and additional frequency into the market. And so, in order for any of that to be viable, it really has to come with a tower.”
