Greater Des Moines business leaders last week praised Adel city officials for trying to resuscitate a proposal to build a general aviation airport to serve corporate jet travel in fast-growing Dallas County, despite political pressure from opponents to let the plan die.

“Good leaders today have to swim against the current for the long-term benefit of the people,” said Larry Haberman, president of Monarch Manufacturing Co. and its holding company, Monarch Holdings. Monarch is based in unincorporated Ortonville, located between Adel and Waukee and the preferred airport site identified in preliminary studies. Haberman said construction of an airport is “essential” to get the full value of the Ortonville Business Park, which the Dallas County Board of Supervisors subsidized.

Several other business leaders spoke during the 90-minute April 11 public hearing, required before the Adel City Council could consider the first reading of an ordinance to establish an airport authority to further study the idea. The airport proposal has floundered over the past two years amid criticism by some Dallas County residents that it’s beneficial only to corporate interests, potentially burdensome to property taxpayers and a duplication of general aviation services in the region. Among the crowd of about 100 spectators, several Adel and Dallas County residents enumerated those themes.

However, city and private-sector leaders said last week they are confident that the airport could be built without taxpayer support. The Federal Aviation Administration has included the proposed airport in its National Plan for Integrated Airport Services, making it eligible for 95 percent federal funding, and work is under way to get the required 5 percent matching funds from corporations that would use it. Preliminary estimates put the cost to build the airport at around $25 million.

Bruce Cheek, a vice president at West Des Moines-based American Equity Investment Life Insurance Co., said Chairman and CEO David Noble has pledged his financial support to the airport. American Equity has $17 billion in assets and does business in 49 states, generating $2 million a year in premiums. The company owns three jets.

“You have got to have an airport that serves corporate America,” Cheek said. “American Equity is very, very much committed, and that comes directly from Dave to financially and otherwise support the Metro West regional Airport.”

Also speaking in favor of the proposal was Bob Pulver, president and CEO of West Des Moines-based All-State Industries Inc., who said his business is a “poster child for general aviation.” All-State was a $3 million company in 1982 when he started flying in 1982, “and here we are now a $70 million company” with five offices around the country “because I didn’t have to put up with time constraints.”

He encouraged leaders to look beyond immediate needs and plan aggressively for the next 20 years, when jets will be less expensive and will be common in major industries. “General aviation will do wonders for your economic development,” Pulver said.

Adel attorney Randy Hefner, president of the private economic development group Adel Developers, cited “eye-popping numbers” in a 2004 study completed by economists Harvey Siegelman and Daniel Otto as he encouraged council members to keep the airport study alive. Siegelman, a former state economist and an adjunct economics professor at Drake University, and Otto, an economics professor at Iowa State University, estimated that the development of a regional airport could contribute $285 million more a year in property taxes. The study also estimates the airport could create a payroll of $16 million over 20 years and increase retail activity by about $39.5 million during the same period, as well as have other positive influences on the local economy.

“Look at the economic-impact report,” Hefner said. “This will not just benefit a few.”

Though Dallas County is the 38th-fastest-growing county in the nation with a 27 percent population increase between 2000 and 2005, its growth hasn’t been a healthy mix of commercial, residential and industrial development, Hefner said, and Adel runs the risk of becoming a bedroom community for Greater Des Moines without that mix.

Residential properties and strip malls don’t contribute “much in the way of property taxes.”

The council approved the first reading of the airport authority ordinance, 4-0, with one council member absent. It must be approved two more times before the airport authority, which would be made up of three council appointees from anywhere in Dallas County, would be official.