ROCK SPRINGS — The Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport was seeking three approvals for a $1.09 million grant and it was granted.
During the Rock Springs City Council meeting Tuesday evening, the Council listened to Airport Director Devon Brubaker give a presentation on a grant application he recently submitted.
Brubaker said he had applied for and received notification that the airport was going to receive a $1,094,717 Federal Aviation Administration Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act grant.
“This is the fastest grant I’ve ever seen from the federal government,” Brubaker said in an earlier interview.
This was Brubaker’s last stop because he needed three entities, the RS City Council, the Sweetwater County Commission and the Southwest Wyoming Regional Airport Board, to accept the grant since all three were sponsors.
The Rock Springs City Council was the last of three boards to approve the request and it did so with a unanimous vote.
With the acceptance of all three boards, the airport board will have some time to decide when and how much money to spend. Brubaker said the FAA CARES Act stated the money can be spent on anything airport revenue can legally be spent on.
“There are certain things airport revenues can and cannot be spent on and we just have to follow that same policy with this money,” Brubaker said in an interview Monday.
“The challenge that we are facing is we just don’t know how long the downturn is going to last and what the shortfall is going to look like short term,” he said.
The grant approval couldn’t have come at a better time.
“We’ve lost 97 percent of our passengers and we’ve lost about 80 percent of our revenues,” he said.
During the meeting, Brubaker said he could go on and on about how much revenue the airport has lost, but he just gave them some general numbers.
The airport has lost about 70 percent of airline flights and 90 percent of general aviation flights.
“It’s been pretty brutal,” Brubaker said in the interveiw.
The next step is for the airport board to look toward the future and decide when and how much of the money it should spend. They have four years to spend all of the money, however, Brubaker didn’t think it would take them that long.
