MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A contract bid for Phase 4 of the Morgantown Municipal Airport Runway Extension Project has been given the green light.
The Morgantown City Council unanimously approved the bid contract of approximately $6.5 million to Pennsylvania based firm Cast and Baker Corporation as part of their regular meeting Tuesday night. The bid was approved amongst six competing bids based on the recommendations of Morgantown Airport Director Jonathan Vrabel and Morgantown City Manager Kim Haws and will include adding alternate bids to bring a total estimation of the bid to approximately $9.1 million.
“It’s recommended that Cast and Baker Corporation be awarded this contract as the apparent low bidder at $6,541,576 for the base bid and $9,122,000 for the total bid,” said Haws.
The work will consist of further clearing and area preparation that has taken place at the Morgantown Municipal Airport since 2021. The selection of the contract was done with the help of private contractor consultations with funding supported by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grants. According to Haws, the FAA allocation of over $7 million for Phase 4 of the Morgantown Municipal Airport Runway Extension Project, as well as additional grant funding, allowed for increased responses and a construction start time of late 2024 once the bid received formal approval from the council.
“The actual amount that was awarded (by the FAA) was about $7.5 million, and we were just awarded an extra $2 million, so that allows us to complete the project,” Haws said.
Phase 4 of the Morgantown Airport Runway Extension Project will be followed by FAA-funded phases that will be completed based on annual dollar amounts received on a federal level. According to Assistant City Manager Emily Muzzarelli, the phases will be enacted in accordance with the federal dollar amounts, with no firm phase deadline on the project to expand the airport runway to 1,001 feet. The city also reported that the just over $9 million for the project is among the larger grants accepted by the city, with a previous $5 million grant accepted in 2023.
“It’s kind of a moving target depending on what the FAA funding comes in at,” said Muzzarelli on the future phases of the project. “So this would be a more sizeable chunk than some of the projects that we have had in the past, so the more of these we get, the less phases (we’ll have),” she said.
The plan for airport officials is to have the Morgantown Municipal Airport Runway Extension Project completed by no later than 2027, which was adjusted as early as last year. This is also separate from the budget of the project itself, which has been adjusted to a close to $65 million budget, a $15 million increase from the initial budget released in 2021. With the project already over budget and overdue, city management is ready to begin work on Phase 4 of the Runway Extension Project.
“It’s well within the project budget that’s been established, and it’s our recommendation that it’d be approved so we can get moving on that project,” said Haws.