W.M. Rickman Construction holds a ‘Through the Fence’ agreement at KGAI. State campaign finance records show six straight years of donations to Councilmember Dawn Luedtke — whose office acknowledged it had not reviewed the FAA grant documentation for the North End expansion.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
GAITHERSBURG, MD — A construction company whose owner holds a hangar at Montgomery County Airpark (KGAI) under a special agreement with the publicly-funded agency that operates the airport has donated $11,125 to the political campaigns of Councilmember Dawn Luedtke and her husband, state Delegate Eric Luedtke, since 2020 — a pattern of giving that raises questions about influence over a controversial airport expansion now drawing community fire.
The donations, drawn from Maryland State Board of Elections records, come from Rickman Management LLC and its related entity W.M. Rickman Construction Co., LLC. Federal Aviation Administration environmental records confirm that Parcel 33 at the Airpark — adjacent to the runway — is owned by W.M. Rickman Construction and houses an aircraft hangar, governed by a “Through the Fence” agreement with the Montgomery County Revenue Authority (MCRA), the quasi-governmental body that owns and manages KGAI.
The “Through the Fence” arrangement grants Rickman an easement over the parcel for FAA airspace surfaces, giving the company direct, privileged access to Airpark operations — an arrangement that is managed and enforced by the MCRA, a body overseen by the County Council. Rickman is no ordinary donor. According to the company’s own website, Rickman Construction was founded in 1960 and has been a fixture in Montgomery County commercial real estate ever since, building and leasing space to medical, government, and research clients along the I-270 corridor. The company has developed casinos, racetracks, and golf courses, and describes itself as having “woven itself into the fabric of the neighborhood” over more than six decades — with its office in the same building for over 40 years. That depth of local roots, and the scope of county-regulated activity the company engages in, makes its sustained political giving to the Luedtkes particularly notable.
Six Years of $1,000 Checks
What stands out in the finance data is not just the amount — it is the regularity. Rickman Management LLC donated exactly $1,000 to Dawn Luedtke’s campaign committee in March 2022, July 2022, March 2023, October 2023, December 2024, and August 2025. Six donations. Six years. All to the maximum-friendly round number of $1,000.
The combined total flowing from Rickman entities to Dawn Luedtke’s committee is $6,000. An additional $5,125 went to Eric Luedtke’s state delegate campaign between 2020 and 2022, including a $2,000 contribution in June 2021 and $1,875 in November 2021. The household total is $11,125.
Dawn Luedtke represents Council District 7, which encompasses the neighborhoods adjacent to the Airpark. She sponsored the 2023 legislation creating the Airpark Community Advisory Committee (ACAC) — the very body now raising alarms about the MCRA’s management failures. She also sits in a position to oversee MCRA’s capital budget requests, including the North End Hangar expansion now at the center of community controversy.
The Expansion That Skipped the Line
In February 2026, the MCRA began site preparation work — clearing, grading, and ground disturbance — on the north end of the Airpark for a proposed 3,600-square-foot hangar expansion. The total project cost is listed in the county’s FY27-32 Capital Improvements Program at $3,425,000, of which $2,872,000 (84%) comes from federal aid under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, $523,000 from Revenue Authority debt, and $30,000 in state aid. The work began before independent local impact studies were completed, before the County Council had reviewed the supporting documentation, and before the Airpark’s Master Plan — last meaningfully updated more than 20 years ago — had been revised.
In a February 19, 2026 letter to Councilmember Luedtke, a District 7 resident and founder of Citizens for Airpark Safety wrote that she had been told by the County Executive’s office that the project was a “done deal.” She demanded the MCRA immediately halt site preparation and noted that Luedtke’s own office “has not reviewed the supporting documentation and studies done when the grant funding was requested from the FAA.”
Luedtke’s office confirmed to the resident that it had not been briefed on the data used to justify the FAA grant application — including projections for increased operations, noise impacts, and safety assessments.
The county’s own CIP project sheet and March 2026 ECON worksession memo clarify the timeline: the FAA required the project to begin design by December 2025 or risk losing its Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill grant. Design work is confirmed underway as of early 2026, with full construction now estimated at $2,800,000 — a cost that has already risen 50% from earlier estimates. That December design deadline became the internal rationale for pressing ahead without the community consultation, independent impact studies, or Master Plan update that residents and the ACAC demanded. The urgency of a federal funding clock, in other words, was used to override local democratic process — even as the MCRA simultaneously acknowledged it had not specifically addressed North End development plans in its August 2025 response to the ACAC report.
The MCRA also told the ECON Committee that the new hangar will add only 95 to 105 flights annually and assured councillors that “these operations will not be training operations which are disruptive to the neighbors.” That promise appears in no binding document reviewed by MDBayNews. Critically, the ACAC’s 2025 report specifically found that the MCRA has repeatedly failed to enforce its own lease conditions. Community members have pointedly asked how the MCRA can legally restrict the type of operations in a new publicly-owned hangar at a federally-obligated open-access airport — and so far, no answer has been provided.
The credibility of that assurance is further complicated by what public records show is already happening at the Airpark’s existing Hangar C — where the dominant flight school operator has simultaneously incorporated two additional active LLCs at the same address, one of them as recently as March 2025, with no public accounting of whether MCRA’s lease covers any of it. That pattern is examined in detail below.
Two individuals testified against the project at public hearings held February 9-10, 2026. At a March 5, 2026 ECON Committee worksession, the ACAC formally requested that the Council amend CIP Project P392502 and establish specific performance measures before approving further MCRA capital expenditures at the Airpark. Separately, the ACAC charged that the MCRA had “not articulated a consistent North End plan,” with proposals shifting “depending on the audience” — from a single hangar, to a second FBO, to additional fuel services — “undermining confidence and ability to manage project execution.” Councilmember Luedtke responded on February 26, 2026, with a memo proposing a narrow language amendment to the CIP project description adding a line that the MCRA would “present project plans to community stakeholders before construction.” Site preparation, however, had already begun weeks earlier.
The ACAC’s Damning Report
The context for this expansion could not be more unflattering for the MCRA. In June 2025, the ACAC — the advisory body Luedtke herself created — issued its first annual report to the County Executive, County Council, and MCRA. Its central conclusion was stark:
“The MCRA is not effectively governing operations at the Airpark or executing its oversight responsibilities.”
The ACAC’s 46-page report found that the MCRA:
- exerts limited effort to enforce FAA Fly Friendly noise abatement procedures;
- has allowed the Airpark’s infrastructure to decay with gravel-floored hangars, leaking roofs, an out-of-service aircraft wash rack, and a cramped FBO building;
- permitted multiple fire and building code violations to go unaddressed since March 2024;
- allowed an H-row hangar rebuild to proceed without a structural building permit — even after being told in writing by the Department of Permitting Services that one was required; and
- failed to enforce master, commercial, and hangar lease agreements.
The lease violations cited by the ACAC are particularly striking: the master lessee, DC Metro Aviation Services, was found to have allowed the disassembly and sale of an aircraft belonging to a deceased owner without family permission — a case that resulted in a Montgomery County Police report being filed. DC Metro was also found to be forcing tenants to use a sole-source contractor for all facilities work, itself an FAA grant assurance violation, and that contractor’s work has been so poor that it caused the collapse of a large hangar door that could have injured people or damaged aircraft. The ECON and Transportation & Environment Committees held a joint briefing on the ACAC report on September 15, 2025 — yet site work on the new hangar began just weeks later, in early 2026, without the performance accountability measures the ACAC had demanded.
The ACAC further warned that the MCRA’s failures put the county at risk of having to repay FAA grants already received, and could jeopardize future federal funding. The committee went so far as to recommend that “if the MCRA is unable or unwilling to implement the recommendations, the County Executive and County Council should transfer oversight of the Airpark to another entity.”
At a follow-up ACAC meeting in October 2025, members learned the MCRA lacked the data management and IT resources to implement the committee’s 15 recommendations, and may not have allocated budget to do so. The committee unanimously voted to request immediate assistance from both the Council and County Executive’s Office.
The governance structure of the MCRA itself is worth understanding. Five of its six board members are appointed by County Executive Marc Elrich and confirmed by the County Council. The sixth — the ex-officio, non-voting member — is Richard Madaleno, Elrich’s own Chief Administrative Officer. When the resident was told by the County Executive’s office that the expansion was a “done deal,” she was effectively being told that by an executive branch that both controls the MCRA’s board and receives the MCRA’s budget requests. The Council — including Luedtke — is supposed to provide independent oversight of that relationship. The record suggests it did not.
At the September 15, 2025 joint committee hearing — just months before site work began — Luedtke herself acknowledged the FAA had “repeatedly failed to act despite documented safety violations.” Other councilmembers at that same hearing called for “clear accountability and a proactive posture from MCRA,” noting that permit violations, noise complaints, and flight safety risks were “not just regulatory quirks but potential liabilities.” Within weeks, the same MCRA was permitted to break ground on a $3.4 million expansion with no independent local impact review and no binding community consultation requirement in place.
Aviation Interests at the Airpark: A Broader Pattern
MDBayNews has also identified a donation to Dawn Luedtke’s campaign from Steve Silverman, the former owner of MOR Aviation, who attended the first large community Airpark meeting in which residents confronted airport management. State records show Silverman donated $500 to Dawn Luedtke’s committee in January 2022 and $500 to Eric Luedtke’s committee in November 2021.
Separately, MDBayNews found no campaign donations to either Luedtke from Ziv Levy, the owner of Washington International Flight Academy (WIFA), the Airpark’s dominant flight school. But public records raise a distinct set of governance questions. Maryland Secretary of State filings show Levy is the sole principal of at least three active LLCs registered at 7940 Airpark Road — the KGAI campus — in addition to WIFA itself: Vidal Aviation LLC (incorporated February 2019), which holds multiple FAA-registered training aircraft at the KGAI address; and High Flyers Aviation Services LLC (incorporated March 14, 2025), registered at Hangar C and operating as the U.S. arm of a commercial pilot recruitment pipeline targeting students from India. FAA records confirm that a twin-engine training aircraft was registered to High Flyers Aviation Services at the Airpark address just two months after that LLC was formed.
The ACAC’s 2025 annual report found that flight training operations — which WIFA dominates — account for roughly 96 percent of all aircraft activity at KGAI, and identified the “dominance by flight schools leading to excessive noise and congestion” as a core problem. That dominance is continuing to grow. The High Flyers Aviation Services website features a photograph of South Asian student pilots standing in front of the KGAI terminal building — confirming that the pipeline is operational. Whether MCRA’s lease arrangements with WIFA account for the commercial activity now conducted at Hangar C under three separate LLC registrations is a question the authority has not publicly addressed.
The WIFA situation does not involve the same campaign finance dimensions as the Rickman story. But it illustrates the same underlying failure: an MCRA that, by the ACAC’s own documented findings, does not effectively monitor or enforce what is happening on its own property — and a County Council that has not demanded it do so.
The Questions That Remain
None of the donations identified in this report are illegal. Campaign contributions from businesses with interests before a government body are a routine — if ethically fraught — feature of Maryland politics. And Councilmember Luedtke did, after all, create the ACAC that has become the community’s most effective accountability tool at the Airpark.
But the pattern raises questions that deserve answers. Did Luedtke’s office ever ask the MCRA to brief the Council on the FAA grant application for the North End expansion before site work began? Given that Rickman holds a special operating agreement at the Airpark managed by the MCRA — and has donated to Luedtke’s campaign every year for six years — what specific steps did Luedtke take to ensure the expansion was properly reviewed? Has she called on the MCRA to halt construction pending the independent impact studies demanded by the ACAC and community members?
the resident’s letter demanded a written response within 10 business days. Luedtke’s only public response came in a March 31, 2026 constituent newsletter — sent the same day the resident was pressing her for action — titled “Solutions and Collaboration For the Airpark.” In it, Luedtke praised the turnout at a recent ACAC Town Hall and acknowledged that “progress on reducing noise and increase safety of operations is slow,” attributing this to “the complex structure of the Airpark and the federal government’s ultimate governing authority over many aspects of aircraft safety and travel.” The newsletter made no mention of the North End expansion, the premature site work, or the community’s demands for independent impact studies. It did not address why her office had not reviewed the FAA grant documentation before construction began.
The deflection to federal authority is a familiar move — and one the ACAC’s own report implicitly rebuts. While the FAA does indeed govern airspace, the ACAC’s 2025 report found that the problems at KGAI are overwhelmingly local and administrative: unaddressed building code violations, unpermitted construction, unenforced leases, and a broken noise complaint system. None of those failures require federal permission to fix. The MCRA and the County Council have the authority — and the obligation — to act on each one.
The $2,530 Wall: Public Records Blocked by Fees
The community’s effort to independently verify what studies and analyses the MCRA relied on when seeking the FAA grant for the North End expansion has hit a wall — a financial one. On February 5, 2026, the resident filed a Maryland Public Information Act (MPIA) request with the MCRA seeking all records related to the North End Expansion: emails, consultant documents, environmental studies, noise analyses, blueprints, and data on projected flight operation increases. She requested a public-interest fee waiver, noting the records concern a publicly-funded facility with direct community impacts.
The MCRA’s response, signed by Airport Manager Justin Bollum: 46 hours of estimated staff time, 44 of them billable at $57.52 per hour. Total: $2,530.88. Prepayment required in full before any records are released. Fee waiver denied — with no explanation of why the public-interest factors were not met, no offer to narrow the scope, and a 30-day payment deadline after which the request would be considered abandoned.
The resident pushed back in a detailed legal response, citing GP §4-206(e) of the Maryland General Provisions Article, which requires custodians to consider the public interest before denying fee waivers, and GP §4-203(b), which requires agencies to help requesters narrow the scope to reduce costs. She noted that the records at the center of the request — financial statements, grant documents, engineering reports — are almost certainly maintained electronically and should require minimal retrieval time. The MCRA has not substantively responded to those legal arguments.
The practical effect: the documents that would reveal whether the MCRA conducted proper due diligence before seeking federal expansion funding — and whether community impacts were genuinely assessed — remain locked behind a fee that no individual community activist can reasonably afford. The MCRA, which already faces ACAC findings of poor governance and a pattern of inaction, is now using the cost of transparency as a shield against scrutiny.
| MONEY TRAIL: Rickman Donations to the Luedtkes |
|---|
| Dec 2020 W.M. Rickman Construction Co., LLC → Eric Luedtke: $1,000 Jun 2021 Rickman Management LLC → Eric Luedtke: $2,000 Nov 2021 Rickman Management LLC → Eric Luedtke: $1,875 Mar 2022 Rickman Management LLC → Dawn Luedtke: $1,000 May 2022 Rickman Management LLC → Eric Luedtke: $250 Jul 2022 Rickman Management LLC → Dawn Luedtke: $1,000 Mar 2023 Rickman Management LLC → Dawn Luedtke: $1,000 Oct 2023 Rickman Management LLC → Dawn Luedtke: $1,000 Dec 2024 Rickman Management LLC → Dawn Luedtke: $1,000 Aug 2025 Rickman Management LLC → Dawn Luedtke: $1,000 |
| TOTAL: $11,125 | Dawn total: $6,000 | Eric total: $5,125 |
Source: Maryland State Board of Elections campaign finance records; FAA Supplemental Environmental Assessment, Montgomery County Airpark (2017); ACAC Annual Report (June 2025); Montgomery County ECON Committee work session memo (March 2026); Dawn Luedtke constituent newsletter (March 31, 2026); constituent correspondence reviewed by MDBayNews; Maryland Secretary of State business entity filings (Washington International Flight Academy LLC, Vidal Aviation LLC, High Flyers Aviation Services LLC); FAA aircraft registry records.
Keep MDBayNews Reporting Free
MDBayNews exists to help Marylanders understand decisions made by state and local leaders — especially when those decisions affect daily life, rights, and public services.
If this article helped clarify what’s happening or why it matters, reader support makes it possible to keep publishing clear, independent reporting like this.
Have a tip or documents to share?
We review submissions carefully and confidentially. Anonymous tips are welcome when appropriate.
Discover more from Maryland Bay News
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.