Federal funding approved for Creston airport

Those who visit Creston by air will soon have a much nicer space to land.

After submitting designs to the Federal Aviation Administration last year, the Creston Airport Commission is continuing to progress on plans for the airport’s new terminal.

The current terminal will be renovated and a larger section will be added to increase the square footage from 720 square feet to 1,950 square feet.

The pilot’s lounge and mechanical room will remain relatively the same. The rest of the current terminal will have the airport office, a unisex ADA-compliant bathroom with a shower and a small galley kitchen, with one side serving as a flight-planning station.

A portion of the north wall will be taken out to act as an entryway into the terminal addition. The new space will include a waiting area, lounge, extra storage and two ADA-compliant bathrooms.

While the new building will be located where there are now parking stalls, the airport will not lose any parking spaces.

“You’re not losing any parking. We would take the parking that we removed here and then put it down here on the south of your terminal,” Jordan Lampman of Bolton & Menk said. “We also are proposing to replace the sidewalk. If you guys remember, that sidewalk out there is pretty broken up and pretty slanted, so we kind of felt that was a safety hazard and wanted to mitigate that problem.”

While the terminal addition will bring the entire building closer to an existing hangar, there will still be a space of 50 feet between the two buildings.

Though presented plans did not include a storm shelter, commission members showed interest in having one addd.

“Originally, our first submission to the FAA had the bathrooms as being tornado shelters, but we started looking into the cost of that and it was probably going to be between $30,000 and $50,000 to do that,” Lampman said. While the airport’s electrical vault meets requirements for a storm shelter, it is generally locked to the public. “It wouldn’t be hard to do, but it’s going to cost some money.”

The FAA will fund 95% of the portions of the project open to the public, but will not help in funding private spaces.

“There are areas that the FAA won’t fund. They’ll fund what they consider public space, so bathrooms, waiting areas, a lounge area, vestibules, that kind of thing. They will not fund FBO offices, meeting rooms,” Bolton & Menk Aviation Project Manager Carl Byers said. “We tried to put everything the FAA would fund in the new expansion and then have renovation area of this existing one with the state grant, because they don’t have those limitations.”

Furniture for the terminal is also not eligible for federal funding.

The airport has secured two grants from the Iowa Department of Transportation, one for site work and one for construction. The two grants amount to almost $300,000, about a quarter of the $1.4 million project. The local match for the construction and site improvements for the city will be just over $300,000.

The terminal expansion was approved in the airport’s five-year Capital Improvement Program by Creston City Council in December 2024. Physical work on the terminal is not expected to begin for a number of months.