A $22 million expansion of Arnold Palmer Regional Airport could begin by summer, the airport’s engineer said Tuesday.
Bids were opened in January and contracts for the first phase of the work could be awarded by April, engineer Scott Kunselman told Westmoreland County Airport Authority board members.
“The bids are more than we hoped, but less than we feared,” Kunselman said. “The bids are in line with the budget.”
State aviation leaders also will need to approve the contracts for the project at the Unity airport, he said.
Allegheny Construction Group of Bridgeville was the lowest bidder at $7.95 million for the general construction work. That price includes some alternate work, Kunselman said. Allegheny Construction submitted the lowest of the four bids the authority opened last month, Kunselman said.
A-1 Electric of Washington, Pa. submitted a $2.08 million bid for electrical work in the terminal. Wheels Mechanical Contractor & Supplier Inc. of Elrama submitted a $563,750 bid to do the plumbing on the project and Hranec Mechanical Contractors of Uniontown submitted a $2.32 million bid to do the heating, ventilating and air conditioning on the 22,000-square-foot expanded terminal.
The airport authority has cobbled together a combination of state, federal and local funding to pay for the project. The Westmoreland County Industrial Development Corp. allocated $4 million for the terminal expansion. The authority applied for $9 million in grants from the Federal Aviation Administration, Kunselman said.
The state pledged $6.5 million in funding through the Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program for projects not funded through other state programs.
The first phase of the terminal expansion will include constructing the shell of the structure, constructing space for the Transportation Security Administration to screen passengers and installing a passenger gate with the newest of the existing passenger bridges being used. The existing passenger gate will be operational during the terminal expansion project, Kunselman said.
In the second phase, another passenger gate will have a new bridge for passengers getting onto an airplane and departing a plane. The expanded terminal building should be completed by the end of 2026 or early 2027, Kunselman said.
“We’re going to be opening more gates to get more customers to use the facility,” said Don Rossi, chairman of the airport authority board.
The authority has wanted to expand the terminal building with two gates “to entice a new carrier or carriers to come in here. It’s the airport getting ready for the future,”
For now, the Palmer airport still has one carrier, Spirit Airlines, which had more than 7,500 passengers arriving and departing in January, down from about 8,400 a year ago, according to the airport traffic record. Since Spirit began flying in January 2012, its highest traffic count was 25,500 in 2019.
Future airline service at Palmer airport could hinge on the fate of a $3.8 billion proposed merger of JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines. The two airlines appealed a decision by a federal judge in Boston to block the merger. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals said arguments would be heard in June, slightly more than a month before the July 24 deadline the airlines set for approval of the merger.
Joe Napsha is a TribLive reporter covering Irwin, North Huntingdon and the Norwin School District. He also writes about business issues. He grew up on Neville Island and has worked at the Trib since the early 1980s. He can be reached at jnapsha@triblive.com.