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AIRPORT BATHROOMS WILL ENJOY OVERHAUL

By AmyJo Brown/OF THE COMMERCIAL STAFF
Friday, May 23, 2008 11:15 PM CDT

Bathrooms.

Whatever other designs and upgrades end up being made to the terminal for Grider Field Airport, bathrooms were the one thing everyone at a town hall meeting last week agreed needed to make a good impression.

Because that’s the first place pilots head after they land, they said.

“If there’s extra money to be spent, spend it there,” Glenn Bell, the chairman-elect of the Aviation Commission, emphasized.

The meeting, held last Tuesday evening, brought together about a dozen local pilots who shared ideas for how to refurbish the 8,000-square-foot, 1960s-style terminal. An architect with the local Nelson Architectural Group Inc. took notes.

No budget has been set yet for the project. And grant money is still being sought to leverage $60,000 the Pine Bluff City Council earmarked last year for the effort. But Roger Smart, the current chairman of the Commission, said Tuesday’s meeting was the first step to making the refurbishment — or complete renovation — of the terminal a reality.

“There will be limits to grants available that may limit the project,” he said. “But we don’t want to start out boxing ourselves in.”

Besides bathrooms, the wish list created Tuesday included a comfortable lounge area for pilots and visitors, a state-of-the-art flight planning room that could attract aviation students and their teachers, a high tech meeting room for the Pine Bluff community and an observation area where local residents could come and watch the planes taking off and landing.

Greg Gustek, director of the Pine Bluff Convention and Visitors Bureau, also emphasized that the airport should expand its World War II collectibles into a more user-friendly museum — possibly even including in the design a nostalgic facade.

Grider Field was originally a flight training school for World War II pilots, and much of that history is still preserved at the terminal, including a private collection of rebuilt planes used in that era.

In marketing the city, “the airport is the weakest link we have,” Gustek said, urging Aviation Commissioners to incorporate attractions for nonpilots and out-of-town visitors.

“This front door doesn’t look very good,” he said.

Also key among the discussion Tuesday was the idea that the airport, a general aviation airport open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, needed to cater more to its corporate clients because of the potential revenue that business could generate.

“The biggest part of our budget’s revenue is fuel sales,” Smart said.

Richard Taylor, of the Nelson Architecture Group, said Tuesday’s meeting was a productive fact-finding mission.

“We’ll take all that and put together a design,” he said, adding that the scope of the project was still all to be determined. “It may be a phased project. We’ll just have to see. I don’t have any preconceived notions.”

Ted Davis, an assistant to Mayor Carl A. Redus Jr., said he was excited about the discussion had at the town hall meeting.

“This is the way to make things work,” he said.

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