Denver Airport Ready for Takeoff--and a Bumpy Ride : Transportation: Snafus and overruns have plagued the $3-billion project. Will it be a boon or a boondoggle?

Putting the finishing touches on the new $3.2-billion Denver International Airport is giving this city a painful course in Murphy’s Law.

Last month, one of the airport’s two hub carriers, Continental Airlines, decided to cut 23% of its Denver flights on March 9, opening day. Then the largest concessionaire was ousted after being convicted of corruption charges in an airport scandal in Atlanta.

Now, with the airport already six months behind schedule and more than $1 billion over early cost estimates, transportation experts are looking for signs that it will perform as advertised by its original guiding force, former Mayor Federico Pena, now the U.S. transportation secretary.

“If it works, it will be the most efficient airport in the world,” said Paul Dempsey, director of the transportation law program at the University of Denver. “But we really won’t know . . . until the end of the decade whether it is a masterpiece of foresight or a catastrophe in public works waste.”

That was not the sentiment in 1987, when Denver’s voters approved what was promised as a 120-gate, $1.7-billion facility, one of the largest ongoing public works projects in the nation, that would give the then-depressed regional economy a boost. It was suppose to generate revenues and jobs for 100 years--all of this without using city tax dollars.

Officials said that the airport was sorely needed because there was no room to expand Stapleton International, a 64-year-old facility plagued by costly legal battles over noise pollution and airspace--and by legendary flight delays in foul weather.

What Denver is getting on a wind-swept prairie northeast of the downtown area is an 88-gate, $3.2-billion airport that a growing number of critics are calling a “field of dreams” and “Federico’s folly.”

To be sure, the city has plenty to brag about. The main terminal is crowned by gleaming white Teflon-fiberglass spires meant to mimick the snow-draped Rockies to the west. There are five all-weather runways, 15,000 covered parking spots for automobiles, computer-operated subway trains, and a $186-million automated baggage handling system that is expected to deliver luggage within minutes of landing.

Other realities are less grand. It is 28 miles from downtown Denver. Stapleton is only seven miles away. Taxi fares are expected to soar from about $15 to at least $35 each way.

And some analysts say that additional Continental cutbacks in Denver would give United Airlines a near-monopoly on flight operations. That could boost passenger fees up to triple the national average of about $7 on each ticket.

Continental will not say whether it eventually plans to dismantle its hub here as part of an ongoing strategy to improve profitability. But a spokesman for the airline acknowledged that the carrier’s flight reductions were prompted in part by higher operating costs at the new airport.

Influential city officials and bankers--worried that cost overruns, delays, flight cutbacks and naysayers could deflate bond ratings for the airport and Denver--insist that these are minor problems and that the 53-square-mile facility is a bargain in the long run.

As it stands, the new airport--which is expected to generate net revenues of at least $23 million in its first year of operation--has a BBB rating, the lowest investment-grade rating, with Standard & Poor’s, the nation’s leading bond-rating agency.

“Whether it was stagecoach, railroads or aviation, transportation has always been key to Denver’s future,” Mayor Wellington Webb said in a recent interview. “As far as we’re concerned, we have a great new airport . . . that will allow Denver and the region to grow and survive in the global economy.”

Tucker Adams, chief economist for Colorado National Bank, agreed, saying: “It is the most important economic decision made in Colorado this century.

“It was built on a 30-year plan,” added Adams, “but people are talking about measuring its success in first-quarter performance, which is nonsense.”

Some airport watchers have less reassuring things to say about Denver International, which has been the target of charges of political cronyism since Pena was elected mayor on a platform that urged voters to “imagine a great city.”

Pena received hefty campaign contributions for his 1987 mayoral race from savings and loans and contractors allegedly involved in land speculation near the airport site.

More recently, Webb has been criticized for agreeing to airlines’ requests for additions such as the $14 million pink granite floors, the plush concourse chairs costing $300,000 and the ballyhooed baggage handling system--which is undergoing final tests and without which the airport won’t work.

“I’m very concerned about some management errors under Mayor Webb, who doesn’t have the management ability or guts to manage a project like this,” said George Doughty, who ran Stapleton for eight years and headed planning for Denver International until he resigned in 1992, frustrated with cost overruns and changes on which he was overruled. “He let the airlines and contractors roll over him. If he hadn’t of done that, it would have been completed on time.”

Nonetheless, Doughty said, he is “not concerned about the financial future of the new airport.”

“Not counted by critics are cost savings passengers will receive because the airlines will need fewer people to staff baggage handling,” he said. “And there will be fewer delays than at Stapleton, which only has one arrival and one departure runway when it snows.”

Webb declined to comment on Doughty’s assertions about his management of the airport project except to say: “I normally don’t comment on field soldiers who leave during the heat of battle.”

But in the wake of critical media coverage, the Webb Administration has slashed $23 million worth of landscaping and roadway projects deemed unnecessary.

Webb also agreed to terminate the city’s multimillion-dollar contract with retailing giant Paradies Shops Inc., which was convicted a week ago along with its founder, Dan Paradies, of conspiracy and mail fraud stemming from its actions at Hartsfield-Atlanta International Airport.

Michael Boyd, president of Aviation Systems Research Corp. and a longtime opponent of the new airport, is not impressed.

“The new airport is a political boondoggle,” Boyd said. “The only major interests supporting this airport are the politicians involved, the bureaucrats paid to talk that way and the paid consultants and vendors who will make money off it.”

Challenging city predictions, Boyd does not believe that the other airlines--including United--will be able to soak up all of Continental’s lost business, ensuring enough revenues to meet bond payments.

Meanwhile, trying to minimize confusion in switching a metropolitan region of 2 million people over to a new airport, authorities are reaching out to residents by sponsoring “get acquainted” parties and ethnic events, such as Vietnamese Day at the facility.

Separately, a group of airport advocates led by Webb and Denver Aviation Director Jim Delong will head to the East Coast next week to meet with the national press in an effort to stifle the controversy swirling around the airport before its scheduled premiere.

In any case, barring blizzards, airport operation chiefs are gearing up for a massive transfer of 100 aircraft, 28,000 vehicles and 2,600 truckloads of equipment to the new airport over a 10-day period.

Half of that shift--the largest movement of equipment and vehicles since the Persian Gulf War--will occur on the night of March 8.

Stapleton will officially cease being an airport and go on the market for redevelopment at 12:01 a.m., March 9. Commercial flights will commence at Denver International six hours later.

“There will be a lot of headaches, and at the end of the day, everyone will wipe sweat off their brows and have a better sense of how to do it the following day,” Dempsey said. “What we won’t know for another 10 years is whether or not this thing as a whole is a white elephant.”