Mobile city leaders are expected to take a major step forward on the city’s downtown airport project, with the City Council poised to vote on sending $30 million to the Mobile Airport Authority to help build a new commercial passenger terminal at Brookley Aeroplex.
If approved, the money would be paid out in four installments rather than as a single lump sum. The first payment of $15 million would go out within a month of the council’s vote, according to Mobile Airport Authority President Chris Curry, who said the funding is intended to keep the long-planned terminal project moving without interruption as it transitions from design work into full-scale construction.
“The project started much earlier this year and the funds are going to support the terminal project,” Curry said. “It’s good to have local monies to support the project because it really prevents any delays. The money will help keep the project going.”
The structure of the payment plan says a lot about how the city and the airport authority are managing the risk of a project this size. Half the money moves immediately, funding the early work that sets up everything else; the rest waits on construction benchmarks, so the city’s contribution tracks the project’s actual progress rather than a calendar.
The remaining three payments, each for $5 million, would be tied to specific construction milestones rather than a fixed calendar. Curry said those payments would likely begin once the project reaches roughly the halfway point of construction, though he noted the exact benchmarks had not yet been finalized.
“The three $5 million payments are based on certain milestones in construction,” Curry said. “They’ll kick in once we get to about 50 percent or so. I don’t have the milestones in front of me.”
While the bulk of the money is earmarked for the terminal building itself, Curry said the funding is flexible enough to cover related needs, including construction of a parking garage and other infrastructure surrounding the site.
The Road to a Downtown Terminal
Airport officials are hoping to break ground early next year, with vertical construction expected to take roughly a year and a half once it begins. The Mobile Airport Authority has set a target of having the new terminal completed and open for commercial flights by the end of 2024, a timeline that would mark the culmination of years of planning to relocate passenger service from Bates Field in west Mobile to a redeveloped Brookley site closer to downtown.
The relocation idea is nearly as old as the question of where Mobile’s air service should live. Mobile Regional Airport — built around the old Bates Field — sits in west Mobile, roughly a twenty-minute drive from downtown and farther still from the port, the shipyards and the industrial corridor that generate much of the region’s air travel. Commercial aviation advocates have argued for years that the travelers, the business base and the geography all point the other way: to Brookley, the former Air Force base turned industrial aeroplex that already hosts the Airbus final assembly line and a working aviation economy on the bay.
Brookley’s position next to downtown and within sight of the port is what makes the project more than a new building. A passenger terminal on the aeroplex would put arriving visitors minutes from hotels, restaurants and the convention district; it would put Mobile’s business travelers closer to their offices; and it would place air cargo within the same cluster of logistics assets — the Port of Mobile, the rail lines and the interstate junctions — that the region has spent decades assembling.
The $30 million commitment under consideration would make the city one of the project’s principal local funders, joining federal, state and airport authority money in a financing structure built over several years. For a city government accustomed to competing demands on its capital budget, a thirty-million-dollar stake in a passenger terminal represents one of the largest single investments in recent memory.
Stimpson: ‘A Long Time in the Making’
Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson, who has long championed the move to Brookley, praised the progress in a statement ahead of the council’s vote.
“This project has been a long time in the making and will be one of the most transformative projects related to the city of Mobile’s future,” Stimpson said. “I think I speak for many Mobilians when I say the prospect of a downtown passenger terminal is very exciting. In addition to the increased passenger flight options and lower airfares, this move will help continue to capitalize on the synergy between the Port of Mobile, the downtown airport and our interstate and rail systems.”
Stimpson said he expects the council to formally approve the funding at its upcoming meeting.
“I look forward to next week, when I am confident the City Council will vote to take this next step in ensuring the city of Mobile’s support toward a fully operational Mobile International Airport downtown by the end of 2024,” Stimpson said.
The mayor’s statement laid out the economic argument in a single sentence: flights, fares and freight, all reinforcing one another. The claim that a downtown terminal would bring more carriers and lower fares rests on the traffic equation — more convenient access draws more passengers, and more passengers draw airlines looking for routes that will fill.
Curry said the consistent backing from both the mayor’s office and the council has been critical to the project’s momentum.
“The mayor and council have been committed from Day 1,” Curry said. “When they led the way in support, there was no doubt in my mind everything would come together.”
The Case Supporters Have Made
Supporters of the Brookley relocation have long argued that a downtown terminal would better position Mobile to attract additional carriers and routes, while strengthening connections between the airport, the Port of Mobile and the region’s highway and rail networks. City and airport officials have framed the project as one of the more significant infrastructure investments in Mobile in recent years.
The argument runs on several tracks at once. A terminal at Brookley shortens the drive for the largest concentration of the region’s frequent flyers — downtown businesses, the medical district and the industrial plants along the water. It consolidates aviation on a site already built for it, where runways, hangars and aerospace tenants are already at work. And it ties passenger service to the cargo story: an airport beside the port can move people and freight through the same corridor, which is how mid-sized cities attract service that smaller markets lose.
The counterweights have always been practical. Moving a commercial terminal means building one from the ground up — a terminal, a garage, aprons, road connections — while the existing airport keeps flying. It means convincing carriers to shift operations to a new field on a fixed date, and it means the city and the authority absorbing construction risk during the transition. The four-part payment plan the council is considering reflects exactly those calculations: enough money up front to keep the schedule, and staged payments to keep the city’s exposure tied to performance.
The end-2024 target gives the region a date to plan around. If the authority’s schedule holds, ground would break early next year, the frame of the terminal would rise through a year and a half of vertical construction, and passengers would begin flying out of Brookley within sight of downtown before the end of the following year — completing a relocation debated in Mobile since the days when Brookley Air Force Base closed and the city began deciding what to do with the land.
Other Business on the Council’s Agenda
The council’s agenda for the same meeting includes other notable items. Members are set to consider a resolution to send bomb technicians and specialized equipment to Birmingham to assist with security for the upcoming World Games, a multi-sport international competition that draws thousands of athletes and visitors.
The request reflects the scale of the event and the way Alabama’s cities share public-safety resources. Birmingham is hosting the games, and specialized units — bomb technicians among them — are being drawn from across the state to cover a security footprint that spans venues, hotels and transportation routes for the duration of the competition. For Mobile’s police department, sending technicians and equipment means lending expertise built through years of local events to the state’s largest security operation of the summer.
The council is also expected to take up a $449,671 contract with the Water Institute of the Gulf to conduct a citywide resilience assessment.
That assessment is intended to help city officials, local businesses and other stakeholders better understand how to prepare for stresses on the local water supply, including natural disasters and other disruptions. As part of the contract, the Water Institute of the Gulf would also help develop a long-term plan for building resiliency into the city’s water infrastructure.
The Water Institute of the Gulf, a research organization focused on Gulf Coast water systems, would bring the kind of coastal expertise Mobile’s situation demands. A port city built on Mobile Bay’s edge, laced with waterways and prone to hurricanes and heavy rainfall, faces a specific version of the water question: not only how much water the city needs in a crisis, but how its systems — supply, drainage, treatment — hold up when storms push water in the wrong direction.
The two agenda items, considered alongside the airport funding, sketch the range of what Mobile’s government is managing at once: a generational capital project moving into construction, a short-term public-safety commitment that reaches across the state, and a long-horizon study aimed at protecting the infrastructure the city already has. Together they describe a city spending on its future while hedging against what storms, floods and disruptions might do to its present.
The council’s vote next week would formalize the airport money and set the payment schedule in motion. For the airport authority, it converts years of planning into a funded construction schedule; for the city, it puts Mobile among the small number of American cities that have deliberately moved their commercial airport closer to downtown rather than farther away. Both outcomes, in the words of the officials promoting it, point toward a fully operational Mobile International Airport downtown by the end of 2024.