AUBURN – In just over a month, the city of Auburn will have a fully functional and paved airport.
The runway is already paved and construction crews are now working on surfacing ramps and the skirting surrounding the runways. The city hopes the entire project is complete by October 1st of 2016.
The project in it’s entirety costs just short of $3 million with the FAA paying the majority.
The city of Auburn is responsible for a 10 percent match of the FAA funding which is around $260,000. NPPD contributed another $197,000 to the runway project. NPPD will be utilizing the airport frequently to conduct business at the Cooper plant.
Auburn Mayor Scott Kudrna says the city has desperately needed to pave their airport runway for around 40 years.
“We’re the only community with over 3,000 people that doesn’t have a paved runway, in the state of Nebraska,” says Kudrna.
Before the airport renovations, planes were forced to land on a grass runway at the airfield. That was a problem for insurance companies, who oftentimes would not allow their pilots to land planes on the grass.
“Even though a pilot or their was certainly capable of doing it, insurance wouldn’t cover those landings,” says Kudrna.
One reason this project took 40 years to complete is the fact that the city needed FAA funding. In order for the the Federal Aviation Administration to give airports funding, they require airports to have the capacity to store a certain number of airplanes.
Auburn’s airport fell below that threshold and therefore they built a hangar to store 4-6 more planes, so they could the grant from the FAA.
So with the paving and the new hangar, which costs around $350,000, the city of Auburn will pay a total over $500,000 for the project.
“We want to make sure this a viable amenity to our community and in order to do that we had to make these investments. FFA is a big, big part of small municipal airport funding,” says Kudrna.
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