Ogden City lost millions of taxpayer dollars operating the Ogden-Hinckley Airport at a deficit for over a decade, a new legislative audit found.
The performance audit, published by the Utah Office of the Legislative Auditor General on Wednesday, found Ogden-Hinckley Airport was operating at a loss every year from 2006 to 2022, with a total financial loss of $15 million. The largest annual loss of around $1.7 million happened in 2008, with its smallest annual loss was around $200,000 in 2014.
The city subsidized those losses through its general fund and money collected from the Business Depot Ogden industrial park. The audit also found that the airport was “not a priority to city governance for many years,” and found that a lack of planning contributed to the airport losing money.
The audit outlined how the Ogden airport received $10 million in state funds in 2020 for upgrades to the airport. At the time, Ogden City claimed the funding would bring 3,000 new jobs and around $250 million in new earnings. However, despite most of the upgrades being made to the airport, the new jobs and new earnings have not materialized, the audit says.
Legislative auditors also found a little over half of the airport’s 244 aircraft hangers have no building or code inspection on record. The audit goes on to say, “22 hangars have no functioning aircraft and for 43 more hangars there is no aircraft information.”
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