Escanaba Looks to SCASDP for Marketing Funds

(MoneyWatch)  This is part of my week-long look at the 2008 Small Community Air Service Development Program (SCASDP) applications. Yesterday, I wrote about Elko's bid to support a new Reno flight.

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There tend to be two major categories of SCASDP grant applications. Some places want money to subsidize new air service while others want marketing money to promote what they have. Delta County Airport (in Escanaba, Michigan) has an interesting problem that I think makes their application for the latter type of grant quite compelling.

Like many cities in the Essential Air Service program, Escanaba has recently seen quite a bit of turbulence in its service levels. The airport was served by Midwest Connect for some time until Midwest announced it would not continue there. The government opened the bid and after some issues, Northwest Airlink (operated by Mesaba) won the bid for a couple daily flights. They planned to begin on June 5 of this year. Unfortunately, Midwest Connect decided to give a week's notice and pulled out effective April 5, leaving the airport with no service for two months.

So now we have an airport that had no service for a period of time and now has a new airline going to a new connecting hub. That's a lot of change. For that reason, Delta County Airport has applied for $181,000 to support a two year marketing plan (PDF) to inform the surrounding community of all the changes.

This is the kind of proposal that makes sense to me. People in the area likely are confused about what service there might be out of their local airport. It stands to reason that a marketing campaign (and not a horribly expensive one at that) would be helpful here.