General Mitchell International Airport officials are weighing their construction options for a new international terminal.
On the high-end of the spectrum, a study completed in June estimated it would cost nearly $70 million to tear down Concourse E and build a brand-new combined international and domestic flight terminal in its place. On the low end of the spectrum, a separate study completed in 2015 concluded it could cost around $22 million to renovate the existing Concourse E, the airport’s southernmost concourse, to accommodate only international flights.
But Airport Director Izzy Bonilla said a more likely price tag for the project, which could ultimately include elements of both options, will be somewhere in the middle: around $40 million.
The airport announced on July 15 that the United Airlines and Air Canada gates would be relocated from Concourse E to Concourse C to make room for a future international terminal.
On July 22, BizTimes reported that the Milwaukee County Department of Transportation’s Airport Division had submitted a preliminary budget request to the county to build a new international terminal for nearly $42 million. The request sought approval to spend more than $4.5 million for the project in 2017 and $37.37 million in 2018 beside a line item titled “GMIA International Terminal Redevelopment” in a document reviewed by the County Board’s Capital Improvements Committee on July 13.
Bonilla described the nearly $70 million price tag mentioned in a June 10 study completed by Milwaukee-based Graef-USA Inc. consultant teams as a “high-end, worst-case” scenario estimate. BizTimes obtained a copy of the study through an open records request. Airport representatives plan to work with an architectural firm to produce a more economical design that excludes some optional features outlined in the study, he said.
“That’s too high of a number,” Bonilla said. “We want to go out in the market and find a good architectural firm and see if they can help us develop this thing. I’m thinking it’s going to be in the $40 million range. We need to get creative with how we build it.”
To finance the project, Bonilla said the airport will likely try to supplement the airport’s capital improvements budget with money from the Federal Aviation Administration through its Airport Improvement Program and any state money that’s available.
“We’re going to get creative on trying to get that $40 million we need,” he said. “I will try not to go out for bonds at this point. I don’t think we need to. I think we can do it all in-house. My focus right now is on the central security checkpoint.”
Currently, each concourse has its own security checkpoint, which can be problematic for passenger traffic flow and can also inhibit passenger spending at concession and retail stores located in the terminal mall once they pass through security check points.
A study completed by Graef consultants in March 2015, months before Bonilla took over as airport director, concluded it would cost between $42 million and $52.2 million to expand the airport’s terminal mall and consolidate security checkpoints into one central location that would check passengers as they enter it.
“We’re not using that report,” Bonilla said. “We’re not. It’s way over-priced. That was done without the proper engineering studies. In a way it was kind of a 30,000-feet overview of what this thing may look like, with a few different options.”
The county DOT’s Airport Division did not include the central security checkpoint project in its preliminary 2017-2021 Capital Improvements Plan budget request.
Bonilla said he is aiming to spend as little on that project as possible, which he thinks can be accomplished for far cheaper than the study estimated. He is hoping to eventually leverage some financing for the project from the airport’s concession and retail vendors, which could benefit from the project by getting greater passenger exposure to their stores.
