Up in the air: Watsonville’s airport and housing clash on the runway

Flying over South County, the two long intersecting runways at Watsonville Municipal Airport form an X. From the skies, this X marks the spot for safe landing. On the ground, it marks the spot where generations of heavy political tension over growth and preservation is beginning to boil.

Since the 1990s, pilots and city officials have battled over the airport’s place in Watsonville’s future, an at-times litigious dance around the same central question: Can the city shut down the airport’s auxiliary runway, known as the crosswind runway, to unlock a large swath of land for new housing? It’s a question that has involved judges and local, state and federal government.

After about 10 years of sitting on the back burner, the fight resurfaced last fall. The Federal Aviation Administration determined that the crosswind landing strip was unnecessary and the city would no longer receive federal financial aid for its maintenance. This presented a new opportunity for the Watsonville City Council. In March, a narrow 4-3 majority voted to, at last, decommission the runway and open up space for new housing. It was a move that felt apropos of the larger political moment, in which state and local lawmakers have tuned their compasses toward solving the housing affordability crisis by aggressively working to open more opportunities for development.

The debate opened old wounds. For some, the Watsonville airport’s X also marked the growing separation between the haves and have-nots, where mostly out-of-town pilots park and fly their planes. The pilots and airport community argue that the crosswind runway increases the airport’s safety; they question the city council’s wisdom in amputating one of Watsonville’s unique, revenue-driving assets for only the possibility of housing. 

City officials said a runway closure would take years; despite the city council’s vote, the path toward closure and subsequent housing remains an obstacle course through different strata of bureaucracy.  

Last week, the Watsonville Pilots Association tossed in another hurdle: It sued the city and city council in an attempt to block the runway’s decommissioning based on environmental issues. The litigation, the latest in a history of lawsuits from the local pilots organization against the city over the same broad issue, has cast the airport’s future and some of Watsonville’s long-term housing plans in doubt.

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During one late afternoon in mid-April, local pilot Glen Marshall pushed his single-engine Maule M4-180V airplane from his hangar. 

Marshall, who was sporting a handmade, sky blue button-down patterned with clouds and airplanes, cuts a broad and towering figure, speaks with reserved patience, and moves with casual, unbothered precision. He is a passenger’s ideal pilot. 

As he fired up the engine, Marshall abruptly yelled “CLEAR!”, betraying for a moment that calm, cool and collected countenance.

As we taxied toward takeoff, Marshall judged the weather conditions. The marine layer that often rolls in off the Pacific Ocean had remained at bay. We’d be taking off from the main runway.

Of all possible directions, pilots prefer to take off directly into the wind, known as a headwind. When the U.S. Navy built the Watsonville airport in 1943, the sea breeze off Monterey Bay dictated the main runway’s placement: east-to-west. 

Sometimes a rare north-to-south breeze blows perpendicular across the airfield, known as a crosswind; and more often, the Pacific marine layer moves inland and swallows up parts of the main runway. 

It’s during these conditions that having multiple options comes in handy. The airport’s crosswind runway, angled more north-to-south, intersects the eastern edge of the main airstrip, creating from a pilot’s eye view that uneven X on the ground. 

Yet, the crosswind runway is used less than 5% of the time, making it more of an asset in relief that helps the airport and pilots avoid disruptions during those relatively rare shifts in weather. 

The reality of this minimized role, combined with the FAA’s determination that the runway was unnecessary, helped fuel the city council’s discussion about its closure. But the debate’s marquee issue was housing, how the city needed more of it, and how parting with the crosswind runway would open up the opportunity to develop Buena Vista, an area just beyond city boundaries that Watsonville officials have been eyeing for annexation for decades.

At roughly 6.5 square miles, Watsonville sits largely surrounded by untouchable private agricultural land and the Monterey County line, leaving limited opportunities for growth despite increased pressure from the housing market and the state government to do so.

Over the next eight years, Watsonville will have to permit more than 2,050 new, state-mandated housing units. The city, according to its housing plans, has room to add nearly 2,800 units, owed largely to a new, urbanist vision for downtown adopted by the city council last year that could add more than 1,900 new units by 2031. 

Much of that growth will likely be through the proliferation of dense, multifamily housing development along major corridors and transit routes. Yet, Watsonville’s director of community development, Suzi Merriam, said meeting the housing crisis will mean finding room for single-family housing, too. 

“We need to look at all the needs of residents of the city, and if we’ve got young people who want to be able to live here and raise families, we need to have options for single-family housing,” Merriam told Lookout. 

For more than 20 years, the city has eyed the annexation of Buena Vista, long viewed as the only area where Watsonville could meaningfully expand its single-family housing stock. 

In 2006, when Watsonville adopted its General Plan 2030, the 25–year vision for Watsonville proposed annexing Buena Vista and building 2,250 new housing units in the area. However, the city would first need to lift the strict development restrictions placed over the area by its proximity to the crosswind runway. The way to accomplish this? Close the runway. 

But the plan was blocked by a series of lawsuits from the Watsonville Pilots Association between 2008 and 2014. The pilots argued that the city’s general plan failed to incorporate development restrictions around the airport, a violation of state code. The courts agreed.

Then, in October, as the city mulled its long-range airport master plan, Airport Director Rayvon Williams relayed the FAA’s plan to pull back funding from the crosswind runway, reigniting the closure debate. 

Williams, who has taken pains to remain neutral in his vision for the airport, told Lookout that closing the runway was not the ideal outcome from the airport’s perspective. But in March, upon the city council’s request, he brought two options to the city’s lawmakers: shrink the crosswind runway by nearly 1,600 feet, opening up some room for development and maintaining an alternate space for takeoffs and landings, or part with it completely. The city council chose the latter. 

Before casting a vote in support, Councilmember Eduardo Montesino said limited housing supply meant Watsonville, the second-largest city in the United States’ most unaffordable metropolitan area, was “quickly becoming a community of haves and have-nots.” Watsonville Municipal Airport seemed like a good place to balance that ledger.

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It is easy to paint the 280-acre airport, which caters to smaller, personal and business aircraft, as home of the haves (only 16% of the clientele actually claim Watsonville residency).

But pilots and supporters of the airport like to point to the critical role the airfield has played for the county. 

In the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, Watsonville Municipal Airport was the only way into and out of Santa Cruz County. It is Santa Cruz County’s only airfield and provides jobs, training and business activity — in 2019 (the latest numbers available), the airport brought $67 million in local economic impact. 

The crosswind runway, pilots argue, has played an integral role in that success. 

When President Joe Biden visited Santa Cruz County after formally declaring the 2023 winter storms a federal disaster, his Marine One helicopter landed on the crosswind runway. The runway was also used by first responders fighting the 2019 and 2020 wildfires. 

In 2011, when a plane took off from the main runway and crashed into Watsonville Community Hospital, killing four, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that the pilot erred by taking off west into the marine layer and attempting to climb above it despite the difficult conditions. To pilots, it was the kind of conditions that make the crosswind runway so critical. 

“That is the classic sad story. He could have taken off from the crosswind runway,” said Barry Porter, a local pilot and a member of the Watsonville Pilots Association. “[The WPA’s] contention is that if you take this crosswind runway away, it starts putting people in situations where they might make a bad decision.” 

Preparing for a late-afternoon flight earlier this month, Marshall, standing next to his Maule single-engine plane, said he understands the instinct to point to the airport as a playground for the rich, but argued that a closer look would prove a different reality.  

At 51 years old, Marshall has spent more than 20,000 hours flying airplanes, much of it coming through his full-time job as a commercial pilot for United Airlines. Flying, he said, is his life. 

“I don’t own a house, I don’t have a family. This is my house,” Marshall said, patting the side of his plane. “People think only the rich fly. No, a lot of us just made different choices in life. I choose to put everything I have into flying.”

As we approached takeoff, I wondered aloud whether the closure of the crosswind runway was really a safety issue, or more of a convenience issue. Marshall said it’s both. 

“It’s a safety issue in one way, in that there are more safe conditions to fly using that runway than without it,” Marshall said. “It’s not as if if we close that runway the airport will suddenly be unsafe. That’s not true. But there will be fewer days and fewer times that it is safe.” 

Marshall pointed to a sleek Beechcraft King Air turboprop plane off to the side. Earlier in the week, the turboprop plane blew a tire and blocked the main runway for several hours. The crosswind runway allowed airport operations to continue largely uninterrupted. 

“So, it can be convenient, too,” Marshall said. “Closing the runway just makes the airport less useful. Just like if you lost an arm, that doesn’t make you less of a person. You’re still a valuable, wonderful person, but you can’t do as much as if you had two arms.

Williams, the airport director, maintains that the runway closure, if it goes through, would have only a “marginal” impact on airport operations. The asphalt isn’t going anywhere, and will still be available to accommodate pilots and the community in future emergencies, he said.

“Any time an airport has a runway decommissioned, anyone would say that the airport’s capabilities are reduced,” Williams told Lookout. But he acknowledged the balancing act in front of the city’s decision-makers. “The city is having challenges related to housing, so [removing some development restrictions] is attractive.”

However, Porter said the Watsonville Pilots Association sees the runway vote as part of a more sinister history. 

“We’re talking about the piecemeal destruction of the airport,” Porter said. “If this goes through, this is going to accelerate the process.” 

In 1990, one year after the earthquake destroyed much of the city’s housing stock, a local group began lobbying the city council to replace the airport with affordable housing. According to a timeline provided by the WPA, city officials began looking into the idea. The proposal didn’t succeed, but the episode left scars that still remain today between city officials and the pilots association.

“There has always been an adversarial relationship between the WPA and the city council,” said Porter. “I think [the city] smelled blood in the water when the FAA said it would no longer fund the crosswind runway.”

Few were surprised when the WPA filed a lawsuit against the city and city council on April 22 to attempt to block the runway closure. 

The WPA’s lawsuit weaponizes a tool familiar to those who litigate against the government: the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). The pilots argue that the city council acted out of turn by voting to shut down the crosswind runway without first conducting an environmental review on its impact, as required by CEQA. 

Only a few days before the WPA filed its lawsuit, Porter told me a lawsuit was only one route and that the association was “exploring our options.”  

“We only lost the runway by one city council vote,” Porter said. “Several city councilmembers are up for reelection this year, so there are options to try and back candidates who are more open to compromise and balance the needs of the airport.” 

Porter, who lives in Bonny Doon, said part of this political approach will include a public information strategy to try to connect locals with the airport’s importance. 

As the city and the WPA prepare for Round 5, Year 16 of their legal battle over the runway and the development of Buena Vista, Councilmember Casey Clark said the sides need to figure out how to compromise. 

Clark, who voted to keep the crosswind runway open, said he believes the city council majority has allowed housing policy to “blind” them to other community needs. 

“The airport is something we have and we should not just blindly be deciding we don’t need the airport because we need housing,” Clark told Lookout. “Housing is a need everywhere. I’m disappointed when colleagues have that sort of outlook. It’s like we’re cutting off our nose to spite our face.” 

Councilmember Kristal Salcido, who voted to pursue the maximum potential housing in Buena Vista over the crosswind runway, emphasized that the city council still values the airport as an important asset. She pointed to the airport master plan the council adopted last fall, which proposed to lengthen the main runway and find ways to bring in more revenue. 

“It’s a crosswind runway used [less than 5%] of the time versus opportunities for housing,” Salcido said, implying the obviousness of the choice. 

However, she pushed back against the notion that housing policy is blinding lawmakers: “I’m not saying we should rip up our hospital for more housing. It’s a balancing of the needs of the community, but on a case-by-case basis. We need to balance factors, and part of this balance is the very real housing crisis we find ourselves in.” 

Williams, tasked with leading the decommissioning process, said “no decision has been made yet,” as the FAA has to greenlight the closure through a process that could take years. Williams said FAA approval is not guaranteed. 

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Williams told Lookout.

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