Flying into the future

By Jamie Swinnerton
Tompkins Weekly

 

While standing in front of the new Governor’s plane at the Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport on Thursday, May 3, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced to the gathered crowd of Tompkins County professionals and local elected officials that the state had awarded $14.2 million to the airport for major renovations and additions as part of the Upstate Airport Economic Development and Revitalization Competition. In total, the project will cost around $22 million to be funded from additional grants, and private funding.

The nation has missed the boat on investing in the future when it comes to airports, Cuomo said. New York, the home of so many firsts, is lagging behind in infrastructural growth. The governor touted the upstate investment his administration has made, to the tune of around $36 billion, as the largest investment of any state governor in history. According to the governor’s website, “The State has already invested more than $4.6 billion in the region since 2012 to lay for groundwork for the plan.” The message of Cuomo’s speech at the airport boils down to one simple point: investing in airports is investing in the upstate economy.

“Ithaca provides a regional economic growth center, it’s a nucleus and it spins off economic activity for the region,” Cuomo said. “You look at the Ithaca economy, it is playing more and more of a role on the global stage. People are coming from all over the world to come to Ithaca. Well? Make it easy to get there and make it a pleasant experience. Airports are the new front door to the economy.”

The plan, as Cuomo laid out in this speech, is to break ground this fall on the expansion and upgrades of the airport and is expected to be finished by 2019. The new facility will include security upgrades, six new gates, three new boarding bridges, a 4,000 square-foot dining area, an expanded ticket counter, high-speed WiFi, and will be powered by geothermal and solar energy. A new customs facility will allow for international travel right to the Ithaca airport. The renovations will not include new runways.

“Despite how important an airport is, your airport hasn’t been updated in 25 years,” Cuomo said, adding that the airport lacked “ingenuity and character,” before softening his stance.

“It has character,” Cuomo said. “It doesn’t have overwhelming charisma but it has character… Ithaca deserves an airport that will fuel the economic growth and fuel the perception and the reality that you are the place for the future. The new airport facility will be double in size. It will offer a world-class passenger experience.”
But the airport isn’t the only upgrade the region will see with this project. The Department of Transportation facility currently sitting on 7.6 acres of waterfront property in the City of Ithaca will be moved onto land owned by the airport that is currently not developed. Once the property is empty again it will be free for commercial development.

 

“The community has been asking to move that DOT facility for more than 20 years, there’s always a reason it can’t be done,” Cuomo said. “We’re in the business of getting it done and it is done.”

Once airport director Mike Hall found a space closer to the airport for the DOT facility, Robertson said that opening up the waterfront property became a real possibility. Several years ago, the county did a feasibility study of the area where the DOT facility is now to find out what it could be used for, exploring possible housing and commercial options.

“Today the site is valued at $2.5 million, it’s valued at the current use,” said chair of the Tompkins County legislature, Martha Robertson. “This feasibility study identified these uses that we could make of it at $43 million.”

Robertson promised a few ribbon-cutting for the governor to come back to once the development on the waterfront starts. But until the DOT facility is moved it’s unknown what could fill that space.

“What’s going to happen downtown is going to be transformative,” Robertson said. “The whole waterfront area is just going to pop in the next few years. We can’t wait to see it happen. Just think, you’re standing at the farmer’s market, instead of looking across the inlet and seeing piles of gravel and salt trucks you’re going to see a restaurant, you’re going to have housing that people can go to, there will be – who knows – maybe a hotel where people can pull up in a boat.”

According to the governor’s website the airport won’t be the only facility upgraded to run on renewable energy, “The project involves constructing a new maintenance garage with roof-mounted solar panels that will meet LEED standards. The Airport Logistics Park will also include space for Tompkins Consolidated Area Transit offices and other future tenants.” By using solar and geothermal power, Robertson said that projections show that the annual energy cost will go down by $50,000 at the airport, even with a larger building.

Although the airport will be seeing major changes, Hall, a key player in getting this project off the ground, said the airport won’t be closed at any point.

“We’re going to continue to have passengers,” Hall said. “This is a very carefully thought out dance. CNS Engineers, the airport engineers, they’ve done this in Plattsburgh and Syracuse already. There will be some inconveniences during construction but nothing will change in terms of the service. By this time next year, things will start to be shaped up as well.”

Although the new facility will be seeing a number of upgrades, new runways will not be part of the construction.

“We have adequate runway here for everything up to a 757,” Hall said.

Once built, Hall said the new facility will have an estimated 70 new jobs. But, what will be hard to measure, Hall said, is how the upgrades will affect the business and technology park next door to the airport, and the possibility of new businesses opening up there.

To close the event, City of Ithaca mayor Svante Myrick spoke of the growth and development that the city has seen, in part due to state investment.

 

“Part of the reason I’ve been very concerned about politics from a young age is because I had a strong sense that my family and my community were being left behind,” Myrick said.

While watching statewide campaigns Myrick said there was not one politician that didn’t promise to bring more resources, jobs, and opportunity to upstate. But not a single politician did, until Cuomo.

“When you get downtown you will see cranes swinging, people of all ages bustling around the Commons, a bunch of those new green LimeBikes zipping around here and there, you’ll see the kind of growth and economic opportunity that is the envy of communities all over the country,” Myrick said. “We’re now leading New York State in job growth. But that didn’t happen overnight. And it didn’t happen on accident.”

This growth, Myrick said, is due to the investments in infrastructure that Cuomo touted. The Commons project would not have been possible, the mayor said, without a state investment of $2 million.