Airport gets grant under CARES Act

A $30,000 allotment to the Harry P. Williams Memorial Airport through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act will be used for operations and maintenance expenses at the facility.
St. Mary Parish Chief Administrative Officer Henry “Bo” LaGrange, who also is airport manager, said they had considered using the funding, announced in mid-April, for restriping the airport’s runway markings but elected instead to use it for operations and maintenance expenses.
However, he said a separate project was approved last month to fix the runway stripes.
LaGrange said the parish has completed all of the paperwork for the CARES Act funds and is awaiting word that it is approved.
“Then once it’s approved, then we go online and we draw down the funds, so I anticipate we’ll probably have the funds within the next two weeks,” LaGrange said.
Ken Perry, owner of the airport’s fix-based operator, Perry Flying Center, said that restriping the runway markings was the airport’s most pressing need as they work on the facility’s instrument landing system.
While he said they “are due for runway overlay” in about three years, the markings already have faded.
Perry said he didn’t want the markings to become so worn that it affected the instrument landing system’s work, something he was afraid could happen in about the next year or so without action.
Times certainly haven’t been easy at the airport as of late with the COVID-19 pandemic and low oil prices.
Perry, whose customer base is almost 100% oil- and gas-related, said traffic has slowed in and out of the airport due to the pandemic.
“We got hit with a double-whammy. The COVID was bad enough, but when the oil price went down to nothing, it spooked a lot of people,” he said, noting people were laid off or sent home and customers shut wells.
However, Perry said in recent weeks, oil and gas operations have restarted with oil prices beginning to rise again.
“For the better part of two months, we saw very few helicopters, no corporate traffic, no recreational airplane traffic,” Perry said. “The only airplane traffic I saw was our regular pipeline patrol pilots that come through and buy fuel as they patrol the pipelines along the Gulf Coast, but other than that, we’re just now starting to see a little bit of percolation as far as some of the traffic coming back. It’s been a tough 90 days, I can tell you that.”
The parish receives revenues from leases and a fuel floorage tax from the airport.
“So the more fuel that is sold at the airport, based on the aviation activities, then that’s more revenues to the parish, revenues to help cover the operations and maintenance costs of the airport,” LaGrange said.