MANKATO — More than $2.6 million in architectural and engineering designs for an air traffic control tower at the Mankato Regional Airport should be on their final approach for completion and approval by federal authorities.
Instead, the design work has been in a holding pattern for two months after anticipated federal funding failed to land, putting the long-sought safety project in serious jeopardy. There’s still hope for meeting the Federal Aviation Administration’s deadline for having air traffic controllers at work in the yet-to-be-constructed control tower in just 19 months, but probably only if an influx of money arrives from Washington, D.C. by the end of this week.
“If we don’t get the grant, our ability to meet the deadlines that have been imposed on us by the FAA of being operational by April of 2027 is going to be very difficult if not impossible,” said City Manager Susan Arntz.
An architectural and engineering firm was hired in early February to finish the designs, a task FAA guidelines suggest should be able to be completed and approved in about nine months. At that point, just $912,000 of the expected $2.59 million in federal funding for the project’s design work had been provided.
Those funds were exhausted in July, and the firm was instructed to put the design project on hold with only about half of the work completed because expected additional funds had not arrived from Washington.
FAA officials have indicated that a grant would be forthcoming, but with the federal fiscal year ending at the end of this month, rules require that any grants be finalized within days.
“We do anticipate receiving it, but we also have the deadline of Sept. 12 that we have to sign and send them back,” Arntz said.
That prompted the preemptive measure on Monday’s City Council agenda of granting Arntz permission to accept the grant if it arrives prior to the next scheduled council meeting, eliminating the need for an emergency council meeting on or just before Sept. 12.
Arntz said she doesn’t know if Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” which earlier this year was slashing the federal workforce and disrupting operations in numerous sectors of the bureaucracy, was a factor in the problems with the FAA grant process.
“I can’t connect all of those dots completely, so I don’t know if I could say with confidence that that is the case,” she said. “I know they’ve had some staff challenges with our review and we’ve had some reviewers added to our process mid-stream.”
Arntz is also uncertain if the current problems navigating the federal grant process will be repeated when funds are sought for construction of the $20 million tower, which would need to break ground early next year to have a realistic chance of meeting the April 2027 operational target.
“I don’t know what we can anticipate going forward,” she said.
City leaders and airport users, including Minnesota State University’s fast-growing pilot-training program, are eager to get the project completed to boost safety at what is now Minnesota’s third busiest airport.
The city is also working to secure the state share of the construction costs through a legislative bonding request, and state senators will be learning more about the project when they visit the region in coming months to review various requests.
“The Senate bonding committee has included the air traffic control tower in their tour,” Arntz said.
The city is also considering whether federal officials might be asked to provide some leeway in when the tower needs to be operational. Federal guidelines require the owner of an airport to get a federally-funded control tower completed and in operation within a set timeframe after the process begins or face restarting the complicated process at the beginning.
“We have had some discussions about whether we can ask the FAA to extend our deadline,” Arntz said, noting that the FAA had a role in the delays.