The city of Perry hosted a team of state and federal airport regulators Tuesday morning and gave them a tour of the ongoing improvements at the Perry Municipal Airport, including the new hangar now under construction and the plans for a new runway.
The tour was led by Perry City Administrator Sven Peterson, Perry Municipal Airport Manager Jonathan Walter and Bolton and Menk Principal Engineer Matt Ferrier.
Surveying the field were U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airport Planning Engineer Jeffrey Deitering, FAA Airport Engineer Anthony Pollard and FAA Iowa Airport Engineer Brian Tompkins.
Representing the state were Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) Airport Inspector Mike Marr and Iowa DOT Airport Program Manager Shane Wright.
The new 100′ x 100′ hangar is replacing the old 3,360-square-foot hangar, built in 1950 and demolished two weeks ago. The replacement runway will duplicate the 4,000-foot air strip, which will be used as a taxiway.
The city will eventually extend the runway to 5,500 feet, pending FAA funding, which is covering 90 percent of the $12 million cost of the new runway, with the city of Perry’s 10 percent share amounting to about $1.2 million. The Perry City Council in January approved the sale of $2.075 million in general obligation bonds to finance the airport improvements.
The city’s runway project has been taxiing toward takeoff for almost five years and finally reach the stage of land acquisition in June. In order first to qualify for Airport Improvement Program funding, the city conducted an environmental impact study in 2015 and secured changes to the county zoning ordinances in 2016.
Perry’s improvement plan calls first for converting the airport’s existing 4,000-foot runway into a parallel taxiway and then building a new runway 400 feet to the west of the current air strip. The new runway will be the same length it is today — 4,000 feet — but the zoning changes approved by the county permit its eventual extension to 5,500 feet.
The new runway will cost for about $2.9 million, and the old runway would be converted into a taxiway at a cost of about $1.5 million. The long-range plan calls for the eventual lengthening of the concrete runway, first to 5,000 feet and then to 5,500 feet.
The Perry Municipal Airport received good news last week when it learned it is one of three Iowa airports to win approval for grant funding through the federal Airport Improvement Program (AIP), the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced.
Perry’s $1.5 million in AIP funds will go toward the new runway.
