Willard Master Plan

A master plan project for the area's airport is in the works that could determine future improvements and/or expansion. The project could cost around $1.3 million (with the FAA covering roughly 90%) would likely be completed in 2019. From WCCU:

A master plan is in the works for Willard Airport.

Willard Airport Executive Director Gene Cossey said a master plan is a Federal Aviation Administration requirement that helps determine the long-term development plans of an airport.

"It's a series of studies," Cossey said. "First of all we start by studying passenger demand."

Cossey hopes to use this data as a tool in expanding growth for the airport.

He said the data will be used to measure the demand, especially when it comes to the need for bringing additional airlines to the airport.

"How can we use that study and this data to the airlines and convince them this is a good spot to bring additional services into," Cossey said.

More at the full article and video segment here. The News-Gazette had even more details a couple days ago:

Willard's master-plan discussions branch off into outlets, TVs
...
"One thing we have seen in our new leakage study is overall passenger demand growth for this region has grown by over 100 percent," Cossey said. "Unfortunately, with just American and just United, even with the growth we have, we don't have enough to meet that capacity and demand. People have to go somewhere else. There's a million people a year who want to fly in and out of our area, and we only have about 300,000 seats."

The master plan isn't expected to make recommendations to change the size of the airfield but could include some expansions to the terminal, especially since it was built for pre-9/11 security standards...

The airport has already started working on the master plan and hopes to complete it by the end of 2019.

The plan will cost about $1.3 million to create, Cossey said, with the FAA picking up 90 percent of that, and the state and airport splitting the rest.

"The FAA looks at funding the airport from the attitude of funding what they would consider a public good or a common good. They would look at funding those things that would be beneficial to everyone. That's because the money that they fund it from comes from everyone. It comes from aviation fuel taxes and from surcharges on your aviation ticket," Cossey said. "What we do with the master plan is we try to identify those things that the FAA will fund and that we can get public funding on that capitalize and leverage that money as much as possible."

That full article here with a link to the airport's own information page on this here: cmimasterplan.com.