The municipalities of Winkler, Morden, and Stanley have taken the next step towards potentially building a regional airport.
They’ve awarded a contract to Intervistas Consulting Inc. to develop a master plan that will lay out exactly how a regional facility would be operated. Each community is contributing $30,000 towards the plan.
“This is the next step towards figuring out what a regional airport could look like,” Winkler Mayor Henry Siemens said at the March 10 council meeting where the contract was given approval.
In a later interview, Siemens stressed how important it is to get preliminary work on this project rolling.
“There’s the three of us working together on it, so each step and each approval of the next phase has to go through three councils, three CAOs, and all that,” he said. “The key with this [master plan] is we want to be completely ready and have a shovel-ready project if [provincial or federal] funding ever becomes available. So that’s why we’re going through the steps of creating a governance model … to find out how the three of us are going to work together to operate an airport together.
“The final steps of this would be community engagement,” Siemens continued. “Talking to our residents, to those that might be users, businesses, other stakeholders. But that’s still some ways down the road. We first want to do these initial steps.”
Demand for a larger airport in the region have been growing for years. Where it might be located and what it’ll look like are some of the details that still need to be hammered out.
Winkler’s facility is surrounded by the city’s growing industrial park, Siemens noted, while Morden’s, located northeast of the community, potentially has a bit more wiggle room to grow.
“We can’t build the length of runway in Winkler that we would like to have, so we know that it can’t be here,” he said. “Winkler has absolutely no problem with it being in Morden, assuming that we’re able to do it there.
“We know that we need more in terms of air transport ability in southern Manitoba,” Siemens stressed. “Our businesses sell worldwide. They have suppliers and customers that need to come in. Our hospital’s doubling in size, so there’s opportunities there medical-wise.
“There are so many different things that we can do if we had the right size airport, and we recognize today that what we have in either community isn’t enough. That means we have to figure out what ‘enough’ would be and then how are we going to do it?”
