(Estherville)– The Estherville City Council Monday evening approved engineering agreements for improvements to a grass taxiway at the city’s airport. One of those totals a little more than $116,000, with a major portion of the cost being covered by the Federal Aviation Administration. City Administrator Penny Clayton outlined the scope of the plans for that part of the project…
“You can see that they’ll do design and then all the way through the bidding phase with this, but it does not include the paving, this is still going to be grass. It does not include any lighting at this time. So a future segment of that will have those components in it. What we’re trying to do is utilize the dollars that we have in both the investment IIJA funds and the VIL funds. Want to make sure that we get those used and get started on this process so that eventually we’ll be able to take this runway and pave it, or this taxiway and pave it, some day.”
The other proposal for engineering services that was approved is for slightly more than $105,000…
“Of this particular amendment, $105,000 is the total but $73,640 is the Iowa D.O.T’s share and then our local share is $31,560. We still do have airport revenues available to pay that match.”
She says any paving of the new taxiways is still years away…
“Paved runways get priority over parallel taxiways, so we would never score high enough in a competitive grant application to be able to get that funded, but we still need to utilize the dollars that are already set aside that we are at risk of losing, so we are getting started with what we can and to try to alleviate the safety concerns really is kind of the main focus of this. But yes, as soon as we have funding available. We’ve set aside dollars to match the federal grant and so we’ll continue to work towards that in the future.”
An engineer with Bolten and Menk, the firm that will do the design work, told the council the proper specifications will be put into place for the grass taxiways to accommodate the future paving.
