Storm Lake airport apron expansion wins council approval, awaits FAA signoff

Storm Lake taxpayers who never step inside a cockpit still have a stake in the municipal airport: the apron expansion will add parking for aircraft, create a second taxi route and lean on federal dollars to keep the local bill down. The Storm Lake City Council unanimously approved the plans, contract documents, engineering estimate, bid award and FAA grant applications for the project, but construction still cannot begin until the Federal Aviation Administration signs off on the grant agreement.

Five bids came in for the apron work, and Wicks Construction, Inc. of Decorah was the apparent low bidder at $1.5 million for the base bid and both alternates. After the Storm Lake Airport Commission recommended moving forward with only the base bid and Alternate B, the contract dropped to $1,139,385, about 6 percent below the engineer’s estimate. The city’s local share is already budgeted, and the FAA is expected to cover 95 percent of the cost.

The upgrade matters because the Storm Lake Municipal Airport is not just a strip of pavement on the edge of town. The city-owned field is run by a five-member volunteer Airport Commission and supports avgas and jet fuel sales, pilot lessons, on-site mechanic service, storage facilities and courtesy car use. In May 2025, city and airport officials said the airport housed about 30 locally owned planes and was seeing larger business aircraft, including a reported $25 million business jet. The apron expansion extends the hard-surface area farther south so the airport can add aircraft parking and reduce congestion on the current apron, making the project as much about access and safety as capacity.

The council also authorized a separate grant application to the Iowa Department of Transportation for replacement and relocation of the airport fuel tanks. That project would move fueling equipment out of the middle of the apron, where it has been blocking taxiing aircraft, and replace underground tanks that are more than 40 years old with above-ground dual-wall tanks. Garrett Jacobs of Bolton & Menk Inc. told the council that airports across Iowa are filing far more grant applications, prompting informal limits on how much each project can request. Storm Lake plans to seek 65 percent DOT funding and cover the remaining 35 percent locally in fiscal years 2027 and 2028.

The fuel system work has been building for months. The airport previously faced an Iowa Department of Natural Resources inspection problem tied to its underground fuel system, then pursued temporary repairs while it worked toward a permanent fix. A five-year budget plan had already put the fuel-tank replacement at about $640,000.

The apron and fuel projects also point back to a bigger question about the airport’s future. The city says the master plan was last updated in 1993, and a new planning process is intended to examine runway configuration, obstructions, the building area and future user needs over the next 20 years. For Storm Lake, the vote was not just about concrete and tanks. It was about keeping a small public airport ready for the business traffic, flight training and local aircraft owners that already depend on it.