An ongoing project to replace aging infrastructure at Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City officially entered its second phase Tuesday after city councilmembers voted to allow officials to apply for federal funding.
The Oklahoma City Council and the Oklahoma City Airport Trust authorized airport leadership to submit federal grant applications for the airport to continue funding its Passenger Boarding Bridges Replacement plan.
In 2022, the United States Department of Transportation’s Federal Aviation Administration announced about $1 billion in funds were being made available through the new Airport Terminal Program and the Airport Infrastructure Grant, allocated from the bipartisan infrastructure legislation passed by Congress in 2021.
The purpose of the programs was to allow eligible airports to fund projects that upgraded infrastructure and increased safety. It’s a competitive application process, but Will Rogers World Airport could certainly use some of that funding, said Jeff Mulder, the city’s Director of Airports.
“The issue that we are dealing with, and where these grants will help us, is that the age of these boarding bridges is 20, 25 years, so they’ve gotten pretty old and become a challenge to maintain and keep operating consistently,” Mulder said. “We are not a fair-weather climate, so it’s important especially during the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter that we give people easy access to the airplanes.”
How many boarding bridges still need to be replaced at Will Rogers Airport?
A boarding bridge, also known as a jetway, is the enclosed and movable connecting tunnel that a passenger walks through from an airport terminal’s gate area to an airplane’s entrance. Mulder said the city’s airport department has successfully replaced 10 of 21 boarding bridges, with six of the replacements secured this year.
“There aren’t enough grant funds available to replace all of them at once, because we’re competing with other airports for these grants,” Mulder said. “But our plan is over the next two or three years to try to replace four or five of these a year. This is really Round 2, and we’ll keep applying and hopefully getting grants and hopefully have all of our boarding bridges replaced within that time.”
The grant would be allocated from an aviation fund financed largely by a federal tax on airline ticket purchases. The federal grant funding the airport would be applying for was estimated at $4.3 million, with a local match of $225,000 from airport funds. No city or state tax dollars will be used for the project costs, but the city’s airport department is required to comply with FAA grant assurances.
Specifics of grant obligations could complicate matters for the project, Mulder said, in light of recent offers from Oklahoma County officials to buy land near the Will Rogers World Airport for a potential new jail site.
“One of the grant assurances is that we have to maintain compatible land use, and that is one of the questions we have posed to the FAA: Would that (new jail possibility) be a violation of that grant assurance?” Mulder told The Oklahoman. “And the FAA’s approach when an airport has a violation is that they withhold grant funds, and so that is a concern.
Spokespeople with the FAA could not provide comment to The Oklahoman by press time Tuesday, but county officials were still exploring their options during a meeting that day.
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“We don’t have an answer at this point, but that is one of the things that we’re looking into,” Mulder said.
