South Dakota airport directors seek additional funding for construction projects

Rapid City Regional Airport Executive Director Patrick Dame and Sioux Falls Regional Airport Executive Director Dan Letellier briefed the South Dakota Aeronautics Commission about the expansion projects. They asked the commission to form a subcommittee to tour their facilities and discuss funding in more depth. 

Rapid City Regional Airport

Dame reported a record 452,195 passengers boarded commercial flights in Rapid City last year, up 5.8% and the airport’s third consecutive year of growth. 

He said gate congestion is a problem, including passengers standing in hallways due to a lack of seating. A shortage of overnight parking is also discouraging airlines from adding routes, he said.

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“We actually do get notifications of upwards of 45-minute wait times to get through TSA,” Dame said, in addition to baggage being moved largely by hand and gate areas designed for 76-seat jets handling aircraft carrying up to 115 passengers.

A $70.6 million project to rebuild the Transportation Security Administration checkpoint, baggage screening, and ticketing areas is funded roughly 70% by federal sources, 25% local and 5% state. Dame said the new TSA checkpoint is scheduled to open in October.

The larger project is a $121 million addition of five gates. Forty million dollars is expected in federal funding. The rest of the funding is state and local, including the $15 million state loan.

“So there is a considerable amount of local funding going into this project, because our community views us to be a very important project and very instrumental to the future development of western South Dakota,” Dame said. 

However, Dame said inflation is taking a toll on project costs. He declined to name a specific amount of extra money he’d like to receive from the state, saying he’d rather work through a subcommittee, but when pressed he estimated “$5 million between the two airports.“

Sioux Falls Regional Airport

Letellier’s Sioux Falls Regional Airport presentation centered on its $135 million project to expand the terminal, runways and taxiways, and to relieve capacity and gate constraints. 

“We’ve seen consistent passenger growth, really for the last 25 years, averaging 3.5% per year,” Letellier said. 

He said gate areas built for 50 to 60 people are now serving flights carrying 180 passengers, and that the existing concourse is “grandfathered” against current fire code standards and would fail them if rebuilt as-is.

The airport has secured $83.9 million in federal funding, with another $5 million requested. State funding stands at $3.5 million, plus the anticipated $15 million loan. Local funding is projected between $47 million and $50 million. Although Lettelier’s presentation described a $135 million project, the various requested and obtained funding sources add up to almost $160 million.

Separately, Letellier said talks earlier this year with Southwest and American Airlines about new routes cooled after fuel prices spiked amid the Iran war, causing airlines broadly to reassess their schedules.

Beyond that, Letellier asked the commission to support additional state funding — either as a match for federal grants already received, or toward an $8.5 million terminal reconstruction project that is $5 million unfunded.

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