Duluth Airport Authority Displays Plans For New Air Traffic Control Tower

DULUTH, Minn. -The air traffic control tower at Duluth International Airport is more than 70 years old. Having been built in the 1950s, it no longer meets FAA standards and needs to be replaced.  The Duluth Airport Authority held an open house Wednesday night to introduce the public to the design and plans to build a new air traffic control tower.

Funding for the multi-million-dollar rebuild will come from several different sources because the tower is owned by the Duluth Airport Authority, not the federal government. As of Wednesday, $2 million has been contributed locally, the Federal Aviation Administration has committed $10 million, while the Airport Authority and the city of Duluth have asked the state of Minnesota for $14 million.  That leaves about $40 million needed to fully fund the $66 million tower.

The Director of Operations at the airport, Mark Popke said, “We’re hopeful in the next several rounds of legislative funding that we’ll be able to secure enough funding, and then we’re intelligently constructing the project and phasing the project in ways that we can deal with the amount of funding that we have, and not get too far ahead of ourselves. But at the end, we’re hopeful by the end of the program, that the construction should be unimpacted. And funding shouldn’t be an issue to phasing it. So start to finish, you shouldn’t see any concerns on the funding limitations or gaps.”

The project’s lack of complete funding has made the design of the building a little more difficult for the architects.

“We have to think about how we phase the project so that if we only get, you know, X amount of money now, and we’re not going to get more for, let’s say six months, that we’re still able to do construction, phasing that makes sense,” said Horeya Czaplewski, an architect and Senior Project Manager for EXP. “We’re not just waiting for that money to come before we can do more appropriate type work.”

Preliminary work on utilities and such has already been completed. This summer, one building that is no longer occupied will demolished to make room for construction.  Work on the tower itself should begin in the spring of 2025 and be mostly completed by the end of 2026.