Livingston Parish is building a new airport

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The Livingston Parish airport plans are progressing, with groundbreaking tentatively scheduled for April.

“We’re about to go out and get bids for clearing the area and dirt work,” says Delia Taylor, chair of the Livingston Parish Airport District, a volunteer board created in 2016.

She says the dirt work will begin this month. The original plan was for a larger-scale project but that idea proved too costly.

The current plan involves a phased approach. Phase one includes a 4,200-foot runway. Taylor says the final product will have a 5,000-foot runway with a larger apron and a full parallel taxiway.

“We have to take it from a phased approach,” Taylor says. “It is the most economical approach to deal with.”

Taylor says the plan is to complete all groundwork before the end of the year and begin work on the runway before the end of the fiscal year.

“We’re very optimistic,” Taylor says. “It has been a very long process. We’ve gone through the process meticulously. We feel good about where we’re heading.”

Earlier estimates put the phase one cost between $13 million and $15 million. As of Monday, the district has invested $10 million in the project, Taylor says. She declines to give an updated estimate because she says the “numbers keep changing.”

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I know this is geared towards smaller private planes and some corporate operations. But that location south of I-12 near Satsuma wouldn't be a bad place to bring some regional cargo operations if they could do 8500 ft+ runways. A fully loaded cargo 737 really only needs about 6,000 feet but a cargo 767 could potentially need 8,000+ plus if fully loaded.

MSY has the largest runways in that part of the state. I know MSY is trying to attract hub operations for an airline, which could consume a lot of their bandwidth given that they really only effectively have a single runway that can be used at a time.

BTR's 7500 foot runway can easily handle most Prime or FedEx cargo jets, but I also don't think BTR can expand their runways much more without spending a lot of cash on building over a creek and possibly relocating Plank Road.