The ground has finally broken on the Garden City Regional Airport new terminal project. A groundbreaking ceremony for the project was held Friday. Shannon Dick, Garden City mayor, said in researching for his speech at the groundbreaking he found a paper called “The Economic Importance of Air Travel in High-Amenity Rural Areas” by Ray Rasker, et al. The paper found strong correlations to a resident’s per capital income, earnings per job, employment in professional jobs, education and diversity of job types to a community’s distance to major airports, those with 15,000 enplanements or more. Based on that number, GCRA is classified as a major airport. Dick said the paper found that “connected” rural areas, those that are within about 100 miles from a major airport, outperform rural areas that are “isolated”, those further from an airport, and act more like metropolitan areas.
Source: GC Telegram
