Airport Site Sends City Revenues Soaring
What once was a small private airport in San Fernando has since been turned into a million-dollar source of revenue for the small city in the northeast Valley.
A shopping center anchored by a Home Depot and a Sam’s Club store along the south side of Foothill Boulevard generates more than $600,000 a year in sales tax revenue to the city. That’s about 15% of San Fernando’s $4.1 million in annual sales tax revenue, according to Steve Klotzsche, city director of administrative services.
The $600,000 is San Fernando’s 1% share of the state sales tax and is “quite significant” in a city of 23,682 where the annual operating budget is about $12 million, Klotzsche said.
That $600,000, combined with more than $400,000 in an admissions tax that the city receives yearly from a swap meet south of the shopping center, means the former airport produces more than $1 million for the city annually.
Klotzsche pointed out that the revenue from the swap meet is not a sales tax. Rather, it is generated by the city’s cut of 44 cents out of every $1 admission fee the swap meet charges visitors. The city arranged to take the percentage because of the difficulty in collecting sales tax from the swap meet.
The former airport site is “one of the only areas in the city that has major retail outlets, and it represents a significant portion of our retail sales revenue, so it’s very important to us,” said City Administrator John Ornelas.
San Fernando Airport, which ceased flight operations in 1984, was one of the small, private general-aviation airports that once dotted Southern California.
The airport operated on 90 acres bounded by Foothill Boulevard on the north, Glenoaks Boulevard on the south, Arroyo Avenue on the east and the Pacoima Wash flood control channel on the west, according to Howard Miura, San Fernando community development director.
After closing the airport, its owners sold portions to a retail developer who built the shopping center, which occupies about 19 acres, and to an industrial developer who built the nearby San Fernando Business Park, which occupies about 33 acres, Miura said.
The swap meet uses about 34 acres, and a city public works yard accounts for the remaining four acres.
The swap meet is owned by former airport co-owner Bill Hannon, who said the meet operates Saturdays, Sundays and Tuesdays, filling 1,000 spaces each day with sellers who rent space from Hannon.
“The way we look at it, we’re employing 3,000 people there every week,” Hannon said. Hannon, who bought the airport in partnership with the late Fritz Burns in 1952, said the owners closed the airport because it was attracting too little traffic.
“It was pretty small, and the runways were too short,” Hannon said. He noted that part of the airport land also operated as San Fernando Dragstrip for about 10 years, drawing crowds of 5,000 to 10,000 to the races. Following Burns’ death, he said, the property was split into the shopping center site, the industrial parcel and the swap meet site.
Klotzsche, the administrative services director, said the city considered it quite a coup to have Home Depot locate in the shopping center, which was developed in the late 1980s. The San Fernando store was one of the retailer’s first two outlets in the Valley and among the first 18 in California, opening on the same day in May 1988 as the Home Depot in Van Nuys, according to company spokeswoman Amy Friend.
The Sam’s Club in the shopping center opened in January 1994, a Sam’s Club spokeswoman said. Klotzsche said the industrial portion, San Fernando Business Park, is an important economic force for the city even though it doesn’t generate retail sales tax revenue as the shopping center does.
“It’s quite a success. There are no empty spaces there,” Klotzsche said.
The five-building, 590,000-square-foot park has long been fully occupied, primarily by warehouse operations and some manufacturers, according to Wendie Newman, real estate manager for CB Richard Ellis, which manages the property. Among the major tenants is Pharmavite Corp., a national manufacturer and distributor of vitamins and food supplements, which occupies approximately 190,000 square feet, said Paul Bolar, a Pharmavite vice president.
Bolar said Pharmavite has annual sales approaching $500 million and employs about 530 workers at the San Fernando location. The company’s operations at the business park include manufacturing, distribution, research, development and packaging for a variety of products sold through supermarkets, drugstores and other mass merchandising outlets.
