Executive Director of The Clinton County Port Authority (CCPA), Alex Beres, recently announced plans to reopen the organization’s second runway on the other side of Airborne Road after receiving a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Ohio General Assembly. This will mark the first time the runways will be operational since DHL left Wilmington in 2009. Alex stressed how new runways can cost “hundreds of millions of dollars”, so the CCPA wanted to be “good stewards” of our community’s existing runway and apply for grants to make repairs.
According to Alex, the second runway should be operational by 2026 and provide benefits like:
Development opportunities to attract new businesses
Redundancies so aircrafts can still land during runway repairs
Dedicated runways for specific aircrafts, such as drones
CCPA also recently received a $493,000 grant from ODOT for improvements to the ‘Localizer’ on their 10,000-foot runway. Alex said this piece of equipment helps aircrafts land in all types of weather conditions—which is a huge benefit to Amazon during their busy holiday seasons.
“Usually we average just a half a million dollars in grant funds a year”, said Alex. “This year we are already at 4 million dollars and still going… We could get to a point at the end of the year where we have more grant dollars than the whole time CCPA has been running the airpark.” Alex appreciates our community’s support for the projects. “A lot of times Clinton County gets sidelined… Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati can pull down so many dollars. So it’s nice to have people take the time to [call the statehouse and] say, ‘this is important.’”
Learn more at ChooseClintonCountyOH.org.
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