Big changes face visitors flying into Boise who rent cars at the airport. What’s coming?
Air travelers who fly into the Boise Airport and rent cars would see big changes if an expansion of vehicle-rental operations proceeds as expected.
As passenger traffic keeps increasing alongside the Boise area’s population growth, the city-run airport is preparing a $100 million car-rental center. The project is one piece of a multiyear expansion of parking, car rental, concourse and other spaces.
The project’s first phase is on track to include a building to house rental companies’ customer-service operations, including counters where customers lease vehicles. It also includes a “ready/return” garage for rental cars to be parked when ready for a customer to lease, or when a car has been returned and needs to be made ready for its next customer.
This 600,000-square-foot portion of the project would be connected to the airport’s main terminal by a pedestrian walkway.
The second phase would bring construction of an adjoining, five-level, 250,000-square-foot “quick turnaround” center for cars to be washed, cleaned and refueled.
The airport plans to start construction of the first phase in 2023 and finish it in 2025. Construction of the second phase would “start no sooner than 2027,” airport spokesperson Shawna Samuelson said in an email.
To raise the money for construction, the airport plans to sell revenue bonds in the first quarter of 2023, Samuelson said. Those bonds would be backed — that is, paid for — by daily fees charged for vehicle rentals. This “customer facility charge” is now $6 per day.
With more travelers come more car rentals. Air travel has surged this year, up 26% through October with nearly 3.7 million passengers, compared with 2.9 million in the same period of 2021, the airport reported.
To accommodate more jets, the existing outdoor rental-car lot west of the baggage claim area would be converted to a new Concourse A for additional aircraft, airport Director Rebecca Hupp has said.
“The rental car center creates a gathering place from which travelers continue their journeys into the Boise region, Idaho and beyond,” wrote Michael D. Miller, an engineer and associate vice president of HDE Engineering, in a memo to the city’s Planning and Development Services Department.
Miller said the rental car center is being designed to retain the river theme used in the design of thematic elements in the existing terminal.
The project, known as a consolidated rental car center or CONRAC, was proposed in a master plan the airport completed in 2020.
The project requires a permit to build higher than city code normally allows. That permit request is the subject of a public hearing scheduled at 6 p.m. Monday before Boise’s Planning and Zoning Commission at City Hall, 150 N. Capitol Blvd.
This story was originally published December 3, 2022 at 4:00 AM.
