A city official in Perry outlines that more work will be done on the airport later this year.

Perry City Engineer Matt Ferrier shares that the airport has been an ongoing topic of discussion over the past 12 years, and one of the results was a new runway that was installed in September that amounts it to being 5,500 feet long and 100 feet wide. He describes that student pilots have been getting plenty of use out of it, but the runway has attracted the attention of businesses with larger airplanes that would like to fly into Perry. Ferrier reveals that city officials will be looking to accomplish more with the runway this year.

“We are also taking the next steps of that with looking at constructing a full length parallel taxiway again to accommodate some of those aircrafts coming in and be a catalyst for some of that economic development going on.”

Ferrier adds that the State of Iowa gave the City of Perry a $300,000 grant in order to expand the terminal, which has been in operation since the 1940s. He notes that a few remodels have been done on the structure, but it will need to be brought up to code with the idea of bigger airplanes potentially flying in. Ferrier plans on the construction happening sometime this summer.