Disappointment from earlier this year has been turned inside-out for the Bowling Green-Warren County Regional Airport.
In late April, Governor Steve Beshear vetoed $750,000 dollars from this year’s budget that would have gone to help lure a commercial airline to Bowling Green for the first time in decades. But airport general manager Rob Barnett learned Thursday morning, Kentucky will be able to invest that $750,000 dollars in July 2015 in the second year of the biennium.
“We now have a total incentive package of two million dollars to offer airlines that might be interested in servicing Bowling Green, Kentucky,” said Barnett.
Barnett says a recent study showed over 700,000 airline tickets were purchased by residents in Warren and nine surrounding counties over the past year. He says he’ll continue dialogue with potential airline partners over the next year. Barnett says he never lost confidence that the airport would receive the state funding, even after the veto in the spring.
“We’ve been pursuing an incentive package of this size for quite some time –over 10 years actually,” said Barnett. “It seems as if not only the federal government and the state government and local government along with those larger private industries have truly seen the need for air service in our community.”
He says commercial airline service in Bowling Green would likely connect to airports in Chicago and Atlanta.
