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Port authority members offer input on giving Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport a more modern look
By Ed Runyan
YOUNGSTOWN
Members of the Western Reserve Port Authority board of directors had a long discussion Wednesday about improving the look of the Youngstown-Warren Regional Airport terminal.
The designs and colors are from the 1970s or 1980s, said Dan Dickten, director of aviation at the airport.
The board has approved an aesthetic-improvements program for taking away the “dated” look. The $73,266 project starts this fall with decorative, wrap-around columns covering up steel support posts, removal of a canopy and an exterior paint job.
During the winter, there will be paint upgrades to most of the interior of the terminal and carpet replacement in the “hold room” where passengers wait before boarding their flight.
A third phase not yet approved and scheduled for the winter or spring will involve replacing carpeting in the security-screening area and replacing ceiling tiles in the front lobbies. A cost estimate for that has not been set.
One part of the approved project not yet decided is the color scheme, which board chairman Ron Klingle suggested should be brighter than the beige and light-blue being suggested by the airport’s design consultant.
Klingle, whose company, Avalon Holdings Corp., has done some remodeling of its own recently at the former Avalon Inn, which it acquired in 2014, was not the only port-authority board member with opinions on how the facility should look.
Sam Covelli of Covelli Enterprises and Dave Mosure of MS Consultants said the free advertisements on the walls of the terminals eventually should be replaced by LED screens that can play digital advertisements. Companies want to be able to update their message as their companies’ products change, Covelli said.
A variety of organizations have been able to advertise their organizations on the terminal walls for free over the past decade, but they were notified recently that they soon will have to start paying for those ads, Dickten said.
The change to paid ads will occur as soon as the interior painting is finished, Dickten said. The airport, in Vienna, can justify charging for the ads now that its passenger counts are more than 100,000 annually, he said. He estimates the number will be about 130,000 this year.
Dickten said he also will solicit ads from other entities not already advertising in the terminal.
If daily air service returns to the airport again, that will make the value of the advertisements even greater, Dickten added.
A proposal by Aerodynamics Inc./SeaPort Airlines to begin daily service between Youngstown and Chicago O’Hare International Airport is pending with the U.S. Department of Transportation.