Airport officials are in Honolulu today to finalize and, hopefully, sign a contract with Boeing for the $14.3-million enclosure and air-conditioning of the Saipan International Airport\u2019s departure area.<\/p>\n
Commonwealth Ports Authority executive director Carlos Salas said on Friday that construction of the long-delayed project could begin next month if a contract was signed as planned.<\/p>\n
Construction was initially scheduled to begin in January 2005, but funding issues caused some delay.<\/p>\n
Salas explained that CPA originally budgeted $10.1 million for the federally funded project, including the $1-million design contract with Boeing. But due to the high cost of needed technology, the construction cost shot up to $14.3 million, resulting in a budget shortfall of $5.2 million.<\/p>\n
CPA is sourcing the additional cost from its future grant entitlements from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. Salas said the FAA would release $2.6 million from the ports authority\u2019s entitlement for fiscal year 2006 and another $2.6 million from FY2007.<\/p>\n
The airport project includes enclosing and air-conditioning the departure area, as well as the installation of new counters, an online baggage conveyor system, and a state-of-the-art explosive detection system.<\/p>\n
Salas said there is also a lot of redundancy in the system to ensure that airport operations are not hampered in case of a power outage or mechanical breakdown.<\/p>\n
The construction period is 20 months.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Airport officials are in Honolulu today to finalize and, hopefully, sign a contract with Boeing for the $14.3-million enclosure and air-conditioning of the Saipan International Airport\u2019s departure area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92513\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}