Marion boosts funding to airport

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

For the current fiscal year, Marion budgeted its allocation to Mountain Empire Airport at last year’s level. That was almost $14,000 short of the amount the airport needs from the town. On Monday, the Marion Town Council voted to give the airport $7,000 in January and the remainder, if the town finances are in good shape, next spring.
Last month, Bob Dix and Dr. Wayne Reynolds of the airport commission asked the town to bring its contribution to the airport from the $16,325 that was budgeted to the $30,000 needed.
Budget requests are ordinarily brought to Marion officials in the winter and spring as the town’s budget committee designs the following fiscal year’s spending plan. But Reynolds accepted responsibility for the airport commission missing the window of requesting opportunity last spring. He told the council members in October the deadline passed as he worked to understand the differences in airport funding from Marion and from Wytheville.
The airport is supported by those towns and Smyth and Wythe counties.
“There’s little padding in the airport’s budget,” Dix said, a situation made more urgent by lower than usual fuel sales and increases in insurance costs. Additionally, he said this year’s airport budget is “quite a bit higher” than in the past.
Reynolds said many of the airport’s expenses are “big ticket items,” and that “it is hard to know from year to year what those expenses will be.”
Reynolds said a critical need for the airport is a new AWOS system that reports weather conditions at Mountain Empire to incoming pilots directly and via the Internet. The system “is being held together with a Band-aid,” Reynolds said, a used motherboard that keeps the system running albeit on a tentative basis.
A new system would cost $72,000, he said.
Dix said Marion’s $30,000 share is 25 percent of the airport’s budget.