MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Officials at the Morgantown Municipal Airport hope that new developments taking place in 2025 will help kick the tires on the long-awaited runway extension project.
Airport Director Jonathan Vrabel announced that portions of the multi-phase project are expected to begin in February, around the same time that work is expected to begin on the development of what will be the largest hangar at the airport. This comes as airport officials continue to seek a combination of public and private sector funding for the over $65 million project that has seen several budget increases and completions over the past several years in order to expand the runway to 1,001 feet.
“We’ve delayed the start (of the new phase), they’re actually going to be starting around the second week of February now,” said Vrabel. “They have some tree clearing that we have to do in the area, and then, as soon as they’re getting the culvert pipes in, they’ll start preparing the area before they have to come in,” Vrabel said.
According to Vrabel, the work on what is being billed as “Phase 4” of the Morgantown Municipal Airport Runway Extension Project will consist of the encasement of a tributary (a.k.a., a stream) located a short distance from the airport that sends water into Decker’s Creek, avoiding any federal environmental violations in the process. The approximately $9.1 million worth of work that was approved by the Morgantown City Council in October 2024, which includes the clearing of trees and other obstacles that intrude into the runway expansion, is also considered a portion of what was originally “Phase 2” when the runway extension project was announced in 2021 at a budget of around $50 million. Four years later, with an additional $15 million in budgeting increases and an extra two years added to the 2025 completion goal, Vrabel and other airport officials decided more is needed to be done to secure funding outside of a federal level.
“The funding that the FAA has promised us hasn’t come to fruition the way that we thought, so the project is being pushed out even further,” said Vrabel on WAJR’s Talk of the Town. “2025 was initially the year it was supposed to be completed, and we’re probably about halfway, so we have a long way to go,” he said.
The Morgantown Municipal Airport has been mainly supported with the use of federal grant dollars issued by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Despite the issues related to FAA-approved funding for the Morgantown Municipal Airport Runway Extension Project, contracts to lease and develop property have still moved forward, with the most recent being the agreement with Shaft Drillers International to build a 20,000 square foot hangar at the airport. Topping the current hangar record by about 5,000 square feet, the Latrobe, Pennsylvania contracting company plans to use the hangar for a 25-year lease, which Vrabel hopes can lead to more private investment in the airport.
“We’ve actually been targeting that for quite a while and looking at other folks (to move in),” said Vrabel. “Because we want to do the same type of things, those folks who are local to Morgantown, and have their airplanes somewhere else, we’re trying to convince them that they should be here, they shouldn’t be paying those extra fees to relocate an airplane,” he said.
While plans are still in place to seek federal funding to complete the now $65 million budgeted project, Vrabel and other Morgantown Municipal Airport officials still hope to try to get the runway extension completed by 2027. So far, the extension appears to be halfway towards completion, with the tributary encasement expected to be one of the bigger hurdles to clear, outside of acquiring federal funds that are now under scrutiny as part of the Trump administration grant funding freeze. With more businesses taking part in airport operations and progress continuing to be made on phases of the project, the hope is that these developments will help kick the runway extension into overdrive.
“We have those (under consideration) that are looking for aviation services, but also their company may be interested in moving to a state like West Virginia,” said Vrabel. “Or we have good labor sources and those types of things that can really help their company,” he said.