Thursday, November 20, 2014YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- The Western Reserve Port Authority may already have a project lined up for a Mahoning County site it wants to seek federal funds to remediate.
The port authority’s board of directors, at its regular meeting Wednesday, authorized its economic development division to apply to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for two $600,000 grants, one for remediation funds and one for assessment funds.
The assessment grant would focus on Trumbull County, where the port authority is the lead agency on brownfield assessments funded through a U.S. EPA grant awarded last year.
“We’re still trying to determine which sites we want to remediate but we’re looking at three right now with high potential and one of them we think may have an end user already in line,” said Sarah Lown, senior manager for economic development for the port authority. The site with the potential end user is in Mahoning County while the others are in Trumbull County.
Because the grant applications are county specific, either Mahoning or Trumbull would have to be selected, she said. “It does favor Mahoning County right now,” Lown acknowledged. “We’re still going to look at Trumbull County because Trumbull County has more brownfields and has had less effort to remediate those brownfields.”
Submitting applications for remediation funds for both counties -- for a total of three applications -- “is not out of the realm of possibilities,” she continued. The port authority has until Dec. 19 to apply for the funds and Lown expects to determine by the end of next week which brownfields she will seek funding to remediate.
Lown told the port authority’s board chances for being awarded one of the grants was one in four. “We have a good track record now,” she said.
During the meeting, held at the WRPA economic development division’s offices in Penguin Place downtown, the port authority’s director of aviation, Dan Dickten, provided an update on efforts to bring scheduled daily service back to Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport.
Dickten told board members the U.S. Department of Transportation has all the information it needs to decide whether to update Aerodynamics Inc.’s Certificate of Public Convenience and Necessity. The permit upgrade would allow the company to provide scheduled air service between the regional airport and Chicago O’Hare International Airport, a major hub airport.
Aerodynamics is entering into an interline agreement with Silver Airways, which has code sharing agreements with American, United and Delta airlines. That would provide a passenger flying out of the Vienna Township airport the opportunity to connect with any of these carriers.
Dickten and board members also discussed recent announcements that airlines would begin offering flights to leisure destinations from competing regional airports. Those include Allegiant Air, which provides flights to various destinations from Youngstown-Warren, and now offers service at Pittsburgh International Airport, and Spirit Airlines, which will begin providing service out of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport next year.
John Moliterno, interim executive director of the port authority, said a new marketing campaign for the airport will focus on the convenience of flying out of Youngstown-Warren as compared to larger airports.
“We certainly understand the convenience of flying out of our own airport. We need to get the general public to understand the convenience of flying out of here,” Moliterno said.
Copyright 2014 by The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
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