La Crosse Regional Airport Receives $1.8 Million in Federal Grant, Down 90% in Traffic

The La Crosse Regional Airport received $1,766,727 in CARES Act stimulus funding, a grant being awarded to airports across the country during the pandemic.

The funding should support the airport for eight to nine months, director Ian Turner said.

“[The CARES funding] is going to position us in a very positive way to come out of this very bad situation on pretty solid ground,” Turner said.

It was reported last week that several smaller airports were receiving exponential amounts of funding through a loophole in the grant that was meant to give smaller groups an edge.

One small airport in North Dakota was given enough funding to support it for 50 years, it was reported, while some of the nation’s largest airports were only given enough to get them through a few months.

But La Crosse’s airport is “on the other side of the equation,” Turner said.

“The amount of money that we received I think is pretty fair,” he said. “It’s one of those 20/20 hindsight things.”

Nearby, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport received more than $125 million with the grant, which a spokesperson said was not a “long-term solution.” And in Chicago, the O’Hare International Airport received $294 million.

In Wisconsin, nearly 90 of its airports received stimulus funding, a majority of them receiving between $20,000 to $30,000. Several small airports received just a thousand dollars, and the state’s largest airport in Milwaukee, the General Mitchell International airport, received $29 million.

Nationally, airports are down about 90% in transit operations, and the La Crosse Regional airport is mirroring those numbers, Turner said.

“Traffic is way down,” he said, “and all of our revenue streams are kind of going that same route.”

But he said normal operations — such as safety, security and construction projects — are still rolling along.

“It’s very much business as usual, even though business is not usual,” he said.

The CARES grant can be used for anything that airport revenue can lawfully be used for, and the La Crosse airport plans to use it for personnel, debt repayments and general fixed expenses like utilities.

And overall, Turner thinks the airport will bounce back.

“The airport’s in good shape, even though the current time period is pretty dismal,” he said.

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