photo by: Sylas May/Journal-World

Airport Manager Shaun Cookson speaks at the Lawrence City Commission's meeting on Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2026.

Lawrence’s new airport manager doesn’t have an estimate for when the airport will resolve its issues with the Federal Aviation Administration, but he says that work is essential for the airport to grow into an “economic engine.”

At a meeting on Tuesday, the Lawrence City Commission heard a briefing from Airport Manager Shaun Cookson about the state of Lawrence Regional Airport. Cookson touched on the airport’s future – including the possibility of one day accommodating bigger jets such as Boeing 737s – and on the allegations from the FAA that the city had violated provisions related to airport grants.

As the Journal-World has reported, the FAA alleged in 2025 that, among other things, the private company that Lawrence partners with to operate the airport was charging aircraft owners to park their aircraft on the airport’s apron. These “tie-down fees” for use of the apron were not allowed, the FAA said, because work on the apron was funded with FAA grant money, and maintaining broad access to the aviation public was a requirement of the grant.

Noncompliance with the grant’s provisions could put the airport at risk of losing all access to federal grants, federal officials warned at the time.

On Tuesday, Commissioner Kristine Polian wanted to know when the airport would resolve the FAA issues.

“Is it reasonable to say a year, three years, two months?” Polian asked. Cookson replied that “we have exterior components that we really don’t have full control over,” but didn’t go into any detail about what those components were.

“I can tell you, staff is working diligently to get us back into full compliance,” he said.

Cookson said he hadn’t encountered the specific types of FAA compliance issues that Lawrence was facing in his previous airport administration jobs. “This is something that not very many airports go through,” he said.

What he did say is that the FAA compliance issues would need to be resolved if Lawrence were to succeed in growing its airport services.

“Compliance is not the end goal,” he said. “It’s just the foundation for being able to do the rest of what we want to do.”

The ultimate goal for Lawrence’s airport, Cookson said, is to go from a C-II airport to a C-III. That means it would be able to accommodate some larger jet aircraft than it currently can, such as 737s. This was something that Lawrence’s previous airport manager was interested in, as well, because it would permit university sports teams’ charter jets to fly in and out.

“We’re not trying to become the next Kansas City International,” Cookson said, but the airport does want to be able to accommodate some bigger corporate jets, charter flights and air cargo operations.

To do that, though, the airport will need a lot of infrastructure that it doesn’t currently have, including a longer runway and a fire station.

Commissioners asked whether a fire station at the airport could serve North Lawrence, as well, and Cookson said that could be a possibility. In a previous job in San Angelo, Texas, Cookson said there was an arrangement like that, with two fire trucks parked in bays in opposite directions: one directed toward the city, the other toward the airport.

While the airport wouldn’t need a hangar to accommodate a 737 – Cookson said that at larger airports, many jets still park outside – the airport has had demand for more “T-hangars” for smaller aircraft.

“Do you think there’s a pent-up demand, really?” Commissioner Mike Dever asked, and Cookson, with help from some Aviation Advisory Board members in attendance, answered that there were 65 people on the waiting list for a T-hangar. Dever asked how many of those people would actually base an aircraft at the airport if a hangar became available, and Cookson said there was a financial component to the wait list process, so he was confident that the majority of people on the list would execute.

“I would say 70% to 80% would,” Cookson said.

Cookson also said it would help to have more city staff dedicated to the airport’s operations than just him. “What we are doing is basically a small city within itself,” he said, and having just one person managing that didn’t make sense to him.

Whatever the airport does in the future, Cookson said, he wants to ensure it’s a financial positive for the city, not a drain on resources.

“Airports are not meant to be a burden on the taxpayer dollars at all,” he said. “One of our core tenets is for airports to pay for themselves.”

Commissioners on Tuesday also heard an update from the city’s public works and utilities staff about the new Municipal Services and Operations Campus. The first phase of the $130 million campus is complete, and staff in water, stormwater, traffic and more have moved from multiple spread-out sites around the city to the new facility.

Director Melissa Sieben said that more than 100 employees in the MSO department had moved in, and that this week the new fueling stations and wash bays for vehicles were coming online. Previously, the city relied on a single fueling location and wash bay at 11th and Haskell, but now it has much more capacity to serve its fleet.

Solid waste collection and the city’s maintenance garage will still be based at the 11th and Haskell site for about a year. They will move to the new campus once its second phase is complete, which Sieben said should happen by November 2027.

Mike Lawless, the city’s deputy director of field operations, said that the new campus was already much more convenient than the old arrangement, where staff from different departments had to drive all over the city to get to facilities and couldn’t just walk down the hall to meet with their colleagues in other parts of the operation.

“It’s a lot more efficient and a lot more collaborative than we were in those separate locations,” he said.

Tuesday’s special meeting was for informational purposes only, and the commission did not vote on anything or take any action.