Reprinted from Catalyst, January 22, 2025

To better understand how Minnesota’s small public airports affect their local economies, researchers from the Transportation Policy and Economic Competitiveness Program (TPEC) at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs chose three to profile from across the state. They shared their findings at the 2024 CTS Transportation Research Conference in a presentation highlighting the complex roles and community impacts of local airports.

The profile study built on a 2018 TPEC project that explored the value of airfreight networks for Minnesota’s medical supply chain. In addition, the researchers aimed to update information from a 2019 Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) study that examined the economic impact of 126 of the state’s 133 public airports.

“We were prompted by questions from several stakeholders, including TPEC advisory board members, to see if there were any travel changes or other impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic or high levels of inflation that had happened since those other studies were completed,” said Frank Douma, director of state and local policy and outreach at the Humphrey School’s Institute for Urban and Regional Infrastructure Finance (IURIF) and the project lead. The research team also included Barbara Rohde, IURIF researcher and licensed pilot, and Audrey Clark, an urban/regional planning graduate student.

Data for the three airport profiles was gathered through interviews with airport and city officials in February and May of 2024.

Granite Falls Municipal Airport

Unique among the three airports studied, the Granite Falls Municipal Airport in west central Minnesota receives no federal funding and attributes its ongoing success to the support of MnDOT and the local business community. A primary user for this 152-acre, one-runway airport is one of the biggest energy and ethanol firms in the Midwest—Fagen, Inc. The company hosts visitors from all parts of the US who travel to Granite Falls in corporate jets for meetings and tours.

The airport is also an active UPS hub—vital for supporting local resident and business needs—and draws tourists with a local bi-annual airshow held in association with the Fagen Fighters WWII Museum that showcases a collection of working aircraft from the era.  

Mankato Regional Airport

“It may be a surprise to some, but the Mankato Regional Airport is the second busiest in the state, following Minneapolis-St. Paul International,” Douma said of the airport located in south-central Minnesota. 

Most of the operations on the airport’s two runways support and serve student pilots; North Star Aviation, a major US flight school, trains 700 aviation students who log more than 40,000 flight hours annually.  “As a person who has taken many flight school lessons, I was so impressed,” said Rohde. “These kids fly until 11 at night to get their time in.” The school provides a direct recruitment pipeline to Minneapolis-based Sun Country Airlines.

The airport also serves the area’s retail, agriculture, and health care industries, which include:

• A 450,000-square-foot Walmart Distribution Center that opened in 2015 and is undergoing a major expansion.
• Veterinarians who board planes every morning to travel the country for swine testing.
• Mayo Clinic helicopters, based here to take advantage of the central location.

Roseau Municipal Airport

Ten miles south of the Canadian border, Roseau Municipal Airport mostly serves the Polaris company’s 1,500-employee manufacturing facility, ferrying executives and researchers across the US from the airport’s single paved runway. Additionally, the airport focuses on supporting community development and health care access with medevac transportation.

Conclusions and next steps

Local airports contribute significantly to the economic competitiveness, community pride, and identity of the Minnesota cities that host them, the researchers found. However, the nature of those contributions is different for each airport, encompassing transportation links, business facilitation, tourism, and emergency services.

A subgroup of TPEC advisory board members recently formed to further expand this research and seek national, state, and institutional partnerships.

—Jacqueline Bass, CTS program editor

Related resources

• Research Brief: Sustaining Minnesota’s Medical Device Industry Cluster: A Vital Role for Multimodal Transportation (2022)
• Article: An airport’s story: Granite Falls Municipal Airport (2019)
• Article: An airport’s story: Roseau Municipal (2020)
• Article: An airport’s story: Mankato Regional Airport (2013)