Airport seeks grant for new maintenance building
Pittsburgh-Butler Regional Airport officials are looking to fulfill a decade-long ambition.
They hope to allocate $1 million to build a brand-new maintenance building using money they hope to acquire from a multimodal transportation fund grant from the PennDOT.
According to airport manager Stephanie Saracco, the airport was recently told it was eligible for funding in this year’s round of MTF grants, although the money hasn’t been awarded yet.
“It hasn't been awarded yet. We were told that we're eligible for it,” Saracco said.
According to Saracco, the airport’s current maintenance building is several decades old and no longer suitable for use.
“It is rather old and it was an old hangar that got converted into a maintenance building,” Saracco said. “We don't have a building big enough for our equipment. ”
The grant is a 25% matching grant, meaning that if airport officials are successful in obtaining the grant, it will have to contribute a quarter of the grant award — in this case, $250,000.
Saracco said the new maintenance building has been on the airport’s project list for over a decade, but they were only recently told they were eligible for this year’s round of grant funding.
Assuming the airport receives the grant money quickly, Saracco said they hope to start construction on the new maintenance building sometime next year.
“We would hope to start the construction sometime in 2026,” Saracco said. “It probably would be completed within six months of starting it.”
However, Saracco said the airport would still use the old maintenance building, as the full amount of the grant award doesn’t go as far as it did when the grant was first applied for roughly a decade ago.
“The old maintenance building will still be utilized, because this grant isn't big enough to make a building as big as we need,” Saracco said. “The grant isn’t big enough to build a building the size that we need to have all our equipment.”
If the project goes ahead, it would be only the latest in a series of improvement projects undertaken, or planned to be undertaken, by the airport in recent years.
In August 2024, the airport was approved to take part in the FAA’s contract tower program and has until August 2029 to get a new air traffic control tower up and running. The tower, if built on time, would be staffed by controllers employed by the federal government.
In addition, the airport authority is looking to attract developers to the Airport Land Development Zone, a 45-acre area just north of the airport. Businesses are being enticed to set up in the zone with a tax credit of $2,100 per employee for their first 10 years on the site.
