Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
The county’s financial contributions to the Warsaw Municipal Airport over the last couple years have helped the airport make needed improvements sooner than originally planned.
Tuesday, Airport Manager Nick King gave a presentation to the commissioners, saying, “I wanted to give the commissioners just a quick update on what we have been able to accomplish over the last few years with our partnership with the commissioners.”
Background Stats
He said the airport has about 14,500 operations at the airport annually, averaging about 40 per day.
“The big number that really sets us apart is that annual turbine operations. We sit around 1,500 turbine - those are the jets that bring a lot of our execs in and out,” King said.
The airport currently has 6.5 city employees, along with two high school interns. It also has between 35 to 40 full-time jobs onsite.
There are currently 64 hangars at the airfield, with 67 aircraft located in those hangars. This year, the airport is on track to sell just over 250,000 gallons of Jet A fuel and about 40,000 gallons of 100 low lead.
Four runways are at the airport, even though it only has two pavement surfaces. They do service both directions on those asphalts, King said, and there’s just shy of 700 acres at the airport.
“As you guys remember, we approached the county a few years ago in 2024 and the county agreed to partner with us, and with that $500,000, the very first project was the airport power line project that’s been going on since the early ’80s,” King said.
The total cost for that project came in at around $7.9 million. The Warsaw Airport was one of two general aviation airports that received supplemental grant funding from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to cover a majority of that project. The city had about $450,000 in pre-engineering, scope fee, design costs just to be able to apply for the grant. Of the $500,000 contribution from the county in 2024, $400,000 was used for the match for the power line-lowering project.
AOD
The remaining $100,000 was split up over two projects, one of which was the Airport Overlay District (AOD).
“So this is something that was a long time coming. While it’s not currently mandated by INDOT (Indiana Department of Transportation), it is something we’ve been told will happen in the next year or two and we wanted to get in front of that,” he said.
King has been working with the city and county planning offices on the AOD draft.
“And what this is, is basically a zoning ordinance over the airport. Something to just educate everybody on: A lot of these protected air spaces are already on the books. What we’re doing is the airport is trying to alleviate some of those protections and the headaches that our developers see,” he explained.
The AOD is in the final ordinance stage now. King said they’ve received Area Plan Director Matt Sandy’s comments on it, and they’re working with the city planner on his comments now. City and county attorneys will be involved to make sure they’re OK with the AOD ordinance language. HWC Consulting out of Indianapolis is providing the ordinance language. The final ordinance will be approved by the various city and county boards.
Fuel Farm
“The last thing that you guys partnered with us in 2024 was the self-serve fuel farm,” King said. “We hit some issues with that. First year or so, we had a quote. We had a budgetary line item of about $78,000 for the system to be delivered, and then we had about $25,000 to $30,000 for it to be installed. We put that in our budget for ’25, and when I called the company, the price unfortunately had gone from $76,000 to $178,000, so we didn’t think that math looked very good so we started looking around.”
Luckily, he said, they found another company to work with. The tank was delivered a couple weeks ago. The pad has already been poured and the airport is working with D & D Electric to get the electric run. Once they get the state permits, King said they’re hoping to have it up and running in the next couple months.
Runways
In 2025, King said the county again was asked to participate.
“One of the biggest requests of our corporate users was our east-west runway. It was in not very good condition. We, unlike the county and city street departments, we have what’s called a PCI (pavement condition index) where the state sends out engineers to actually map out the condition of our asphalt. And while our asphalt was listed as poor condition, it wasn’t in failing yet so therefore it didn’t qualify for state or federal grants for rehabilitation,” he continued.
The airport approached the county about the runway improvement project and explained how important it was to local industry. “And we were able to do phase I of that project,” he said.
A couple weeks ago, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) was approved by the county and city for phase II of the runway project. Last year, the western 2,000 feet of runway was done; this year, the center 2,000 feet of runway is being improved; and in 2027 King will ask to finish out the last portion of the runway, if the county agrees to partner with the city on that.
Next year, the projected cost for the rehabilitation project has gone up due to the increase in asphalt prices. King estimates the cost for the project in 2027 will be around $1.2-$1.3 million, but they’ll try to bring the cost down.
The other big project for 2026 is the rehabilitation of the north-south taxiway, he said, in conjunction with the runway project. INDOT, knowing the taxi lane is critical to the county’s orthopedic industries, provided a grant to redo the asphalt two years ago to get the project taken care of.
CR 100E
After going through the airport’s goals and vision, including continued infrastructure and asphalt improvements and equipment updates, as well as explaining how the airport makes money to keep the tax rate down for residents, King brought up the CR 100E project.
“So this project has been moved up in priority with the FAA. Where it was originally tied to potentially expanding the runway in the future, the FAA has now made it a safety issue,” he said.
In recent years there have been several high-profile slide-offs where aircraft landing slid off runways and into traffic and roads.
“(CR) 100 East is inside of the runway safety area of our east-west runway, so that is the main reason we are looking at moving that road from our runway safety area,” King stated.
With CR 100E in place, King said the airport loses about 1,900 feet of runway “every time someone is landing on that runway because 100 East is there.” In weather like Tuesday morning’s, he said of the 6,000 feet jets are only able to use 4,100 feet to land. On a good, sunny day, they have about 5,100 feet to land.
“And what the FAA memo has done has said, if we do not remove that road, whether it is a tunnel, we close the road, we reroute traffic, however that ends up being, they will actually remove a minimum 1,000 feet of runway. It could be up to 1,500 feet of physical asphalt, which would make it so none of our jets would be able to operate out of the airport anymore. And that’s something that terrifies me,” King said.
What the airport is currently trying to do, he continued, is protect the 6,000 feet of runway the airport has available now for takeoff.
A tunnel would include about 900 feet of CR 100E going underneath the runway. Or, another way to look at it, is bridging the runway over the roadway.
Commissioner Cary Groninger asked if the tunnel would be wide enough for truck traffic. King said it would be wide enough for vehicle traffic and school buses but he wasn’t sure about 18-wheelers. He didn’t think it was engineered for a combine.
“Where we’re running into issues is, we’re trying to be careful with our grading. If we start that project at the bottom of the hill down by Hickaman Ditch and we start the grading there, we may not have to have a secondary pump system, which would just mean less long-term maintenance that we would have to have,” King explained.
The issue comes down to the cost. He said the tunnel could be “as cheap as $13 million, as much as $20 million. We’ve never been given a grant to even study what the different alternatives would be, and the FAA does not want to fund that because they just would like to close the road. It would be cheaper for them.”
The FAA has put the ball back into the airport’s court to make a decision, King said. If the airport doesn’t come up with a decision, it’ll either lose some of its runway or the FAA will come in and close the road for safety reasons.
Now that CR 100E has been listed as a safety issue, he said the FAA will start to move quicker on it.
“They know that we are working on it as a community, but at some point they will put a deadline on it and say if it’s not fixed by this time, you’re either losing runway or we will come in and close the road, and that is what we do not want to happen,” King said.
