The future growth of the Great Bend Municipal Airport will be charted after the City Council Monday night authorized Mayor Cody Schmidt to sign an airport letter agreement with engineering firm Burns & McDonnell of Wichita to update the facility’s long-range Airport Layout Plan (ALP).

This project revises the ALP to help forecast future needs of the airport, Airport Manager Martin Miller said. The proposed agreement is necessary to justify future Federal Aviation Administration grants. 

The total cost of the study is $323,070, with the FAA paying 90%, leaving the city to pay $32,307.

“We usually plan out up to five, even 10, years on what kind of construction or issues we need to do,” Miller said. However “the FAA, as the airport’s baby-sitter, looked at us and said ‘you need to update your airport layout plan to reflect actually where this airport is, who owns what, and all of the details that are necessary to do this.’”

An ALP serves as a critical planning tool that depicts both existing facilities and planned development for an airport.

This effort includes an update of the facility’s Master Plan (last revised in 2010), the property map and land-use map. “Those are probably going to be the key things we look at,” Miller said. 

“I was advised at the beginning of 2021 that we’re going to have to do this kind of a project,” he said. This was required so the airport qualified for the FAA to pay for 90% of the total costs for future projects. 

The city requested proposals in April of last year and received two. The city’s Airport Advisory Committee selected Burns and McDonnell.

The firm had to prepare a “scope of work” outlining its plan which had to be OKed by the FAA before any agreement would be available the city to approve, Miller said. The feds signed off on the work last month.

“So, we really don’t have any choice,” said Ward 2 Councilwoman Jolene Biggs.

“Well, we could refuse to sign the agreement,” Miller said. But, “that would send back any future projects until we did.”