Improvements to the Manhattan Regional Airport’s parking lot are now complete and the next step now is determining a user fee.
For years the airport has had free parking, but Airport Director Jesse Romo says a proposal to the Manhattan City Commission on Tuesday, will request a daily $2.50 fee be implemented on Feb. 1 .
“We needed to do these improvements and then we needed to find a way to pay for them. So we wanted to keep the fee nominal, but high enough that we could pay for the debt service of the project,” he said.
The first hour would be free and it would be a $1 there after until a traveler hits the daily max. Travelers would pay through a mobile app, a pre-pay station within the terminal or at the gate using a credit card. Cash will not be accepted. Romo says the revenue generated this year is uncertain since air travel continues to lag.
“In 2021 we could see anywhere from $73,000 to $120,000 in revenue and that could jump up by 2025, you’re looking at anywhere from $500,000 to close to $1 million in revenues,” he said.
It’s anticipated the city could increase the rate to $5 a day by next year.
In terms of travelers who boarded a flight in or out of Manhattan in 2020, Romo says that fell by 59 percent.
After posting its best year on record in 2019, with over 80,000 passengers come through the terminal, only 32,000 boarded flights in 2020, largely due to the travel restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Romo says Manhattan’s trends followed that of airports nationwide.
“We’re hoping that once vaccines start kicking in and people start thinking about future travel and the business economy also recovers with travel budgets that we can see numbers get back to where they were,” he said.
The worst month of 2020 was April when travel fell 96 percent at the airport. It’s the hardest the airline industry has been since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which took about three years to recover back to pre 9/11 trends.
“For this kind of a pandemic event to occur over a longer period of time, we had no idea when recovery would kick in, and we’re still waiting to see what happens,” he said.
The airport continues to offer just two daily flights to Dallas. American Airlines stopped its daily flights to Chicago in late July.
Federal aid has helped stabilize the airport and its tenants’ finances. More than $10 billion in federal aid was delivered to U.S. airports through the CARES Act in early 2020, with the Manhattan Regional Airport receiving a $2.1 million allotment.
Romo says that put the airport, which has a yearly operating budget of $1.5 million, in a position to help its tenants with rent relief. He adds that more federal aid is on the way.
“We’re now looking at a couple billion dollars for airports across the nation, and we’re eagerly awaiting the FAA’s decision on how they’re going to distribute those funds,” he said.
It’s anticipated that a clearer picture of what that relief will look like will be known by the end of January, according to Romo.
He also speaks about the city’s proposed plan to improve and maintain the 150-foot-wide runway to accommodate Kansas State University and Fort Riley air traffic. The Federal Aviation Administration says it will only fund a 100-foot-wide runway.
“When the FAA is looking at evaluating what’s eligible for their funding, they do not include military aircraft. They will only look at civilian aircraft. So military aircraft don’t count into their calculations because if it’s that important to their military missions, they would expect the U.S. to step up with additional funding,” he said.
The entire runway project, slated for construction in 2023 at the earliest, would cost roughly $35 million, with the city likely on the hook for about 3.5 to 4 million dollars.
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