The Yorkton Airport is continuing to see upgrades as part of the Community Airport Partnership fund. One of fifteen airports in Saskatchewan receiving funding through the project, Yorkton will get $36,000 from the provincial government, with matching dollars from the City of Yorkton, to be used on runway and taxiway repairs as well as drainage rehabilitation.
Yorkton MLA Greg Ottenbreit says that the CAP program is about partnering with municipalities to keep community airports up to date, and has been in place for the last seven years. Yorkton itself has been receiving funds from the program every year. As a result, the airport has received just under a million dollars from both the provincial government and the city in those seven years.
Like many of the community airports in the province, Yorkton is an older facility, which began operation as part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan before being transferred to the city.
"It's an older airport, but it's still solid infrastructure, so if we can maintain and improve it, we will see the services continue to improve," Ottenbreit says.
The continued improvements and investments in the facility means that services can expand, Ottenbreit says. He notes that there are many services in the area that need the airport to survive, such as emergency services like STARS or air ambulance, civil air search and rescue, recreational and commercial flights, plus the businesses that use the airport to get into the city. There have also been expanding services, such as scheduled flights to Flin Flon.
"It's important to not only invest in the airport and make it a viable entity for the municipality, but also for the region."
The airport is also key to the city's growth, Ottenbreit says, especially as more companies see the existence of an airport in a city as key to doing business.
"Without it we wouldn't see expansion and businesses in town like we do. A lot of these significant investing businesses see the airport as a need for them for easier travel, and a lot of the corporations that are investing in our airport quite regularly If you look at the Yorkton Airport, we probably have as much per capita air traffic moving in and out of there as Regina or Saskatoon would have."
A regular user of the airport himself, Ottenbreit says that the city deserves a lot of credit for the operation of the airport, both in successfully receiving funds, and doing effective and efficient spending of the money. He says that the money is directed to important areas that might not be visual, like drainage and runway improvements, but that are important when you want to maintain accreditation, expand services and keep the airport running smoothly.
In general, Ottenbreit says that the CAP program is key because it keeps smaller airports throughout the province viable, which is important because if they are lost, the costs of reestablishing an airport would be prohibitively expensive. The goal of the program now and into the future will be to continue to support community airports like Yorkton throughout the province.
