MDOT Report

By Tommy Booth, Director
MDOT Aeronautics

What a year this has turned out to be! I hope that you and your families are staying healthy and safe during the COVID-19 crisis. I hate that we were not able to come together in Biloxi for our annual conference. The sessions are always informative, but what I miss the most is seeing everyone. Hopefully, the projections for the virus are wrong and there won’t be a second wave in 2021 that forces us to postpone the meeting again.

This will be a unique year for our division in that the CARES Act has provided relief funds for the airports. With the FAA funding 100% of the projects, we will not be providing the AIP matching funds. For the FY2018 and 2019 supplemental projects that will not be fully funded by the FAA, we are awaiting Commission approval to provide the full local match for those projects. This would only apply to those projects that are awarded FAA grants before September 30, 2020.

We currently are in the FY2021 Multimodal Program cycle. By the time you are reading this, the deadline has passed, and we are compiling the applications for the committee review. We anticipate issuing the airport grants in early August. One area that we will focus on for the successful applicants this year is the project schedule. In past years, the dates on the application did not coincide with the actual dates. This gave the appearance that the project schedule was not as critical as the application indicated that it was. Also, we still have several airports that have not requested reimbursements. We will be reaching out to those airports again to determine if the funds are still required and whether or not the funds need to be turned back to MDOT.