Secretary Buttigieg Remarks at Eastern Iowa Airport Grant Award

I'm really impressed to see the work that is underway and it's a fitting time to talk about it, because we estimate that today will - with its official start to the unofficial travel summer season - probably represent the busiest day of air travel America has seen since before the pandemic. I know that people across the country have been gearing up for that and that makes this a good time and obviously a good place to be talking about aviation.  

Cedar Rapids is a place that saw the importance and the potential of the Eastern Iowa Airport years ago and began investing in it then. 

As everybody here knows, this has been a years-long, four-phase project to upgrade passenger facilities and the freight facilities that the potential of this region really calls for - and none of that was easy. The team did a great job bringing it together, but it still wasn't quite fully funded to go all the way through unless there was one more bit of help - and that's where we come in, and that's why we're so glad to be here.  

So, on behalf of the Biden-Harris Administration and the U.S Department of Transportation, we could not have been prouder to award the $20 million that are going to help this project get over the finish line. We're so glad to be celebrating that with you. 

[Applause] 

And the whole idea of this funding; the visions, the projects, the plans, the design, the engineering, the answers often don’t come out of Washington, but more of the funding should. 

The funding in this case is going to allow the team to complete a passenger terminal expansion that adds four additional passenger gates to accommodate more flights, improved accessibility for travelers with disabilities, and more ways to fly to or from Eastern Iowa with the kind of frequency that gives you options and a good experience when you do so. 

And again, it's about the good paying union jobs that so many Iowans are getting through this work, not to mention the manufacturing jobs and the agriculture jobs and the tourism jobs that are going to be created and sustained because this region has high-quality, modern transportation infrastructure. 

We are located on Wright Brothers Boulevard, which I think is a really apt reminder that America is the country that ushered in the aviation age, and the Midwest was the cradle of a lot of that innovation. And it's appropriate then that Americans ought to have the best air travel in the world. But we've been slipping. We slipped as a country with decades of under-investment.  

Someone told me I might be the first Secretary of Transportation to visit here since Secretary Elizabeth Dole in 1986. We have I think been since the 1980s needing to do more; whether it's our airports, our roads and bridges, our transit, rail and ports. Thanks to President Biden and the bipartisan leaders from both sides of the aisle who got this law done, we're doing it. 

I love hearing that this place started out as a house. We're funding a airport in Chamberlain, South Dakota where it's a mobile home right now and we're upgrading it to be a brick-and-mortar building, all the way through to places like O'Hare where I started my morning, where we're involved in helping them build a whole new terminal and change their international vision. 

Maybe O'Hare will be home to more marriage proposals like it was for me and Chasten with a little more square-footage there.  

We’ve got a new terminal coming to a Pittsburgh, new gates in Orlando, better bathrooms in Chattanooga that, ever since I began flying with toddlers, I have a whole new appreciation of how important that is.  

Faster security checkpoints, better baggage drop-off, check-in counters, custom areas, boarding zones; so many things are going to make a difference and that's just the airports. We are delivering about $93 million in Iowa to help make transportation infrastructure here more resilient against flooding and extreme weather; something that I need not tell Cedar Rapids about the importance of. 

Now we're helping Cedar Rapids, working on plans to make roads safer for people to walk and bike and drive. Later on, I'm going to be in Dubuque where we're helping to design and engineer an overpass to get across the railroad. That's also going to mean a new path for walking and biking, it's going to make the road safer and support jobs in that great downtown there.  

In so many ways, transportation is essential to the quality of life and economic strength and safety that we all depend on. Improvements to transportation improve our access to all of those things that make our lives meaningful. 

I'll just end with one reflection, which is that I come from a community where when you're growing up, so much of the message you got was that success had to do with getting out. 

If you're at an airport, a lot of times it was where you'd see people who'd moved away come back maybe for holidays or special occasions at best. Now, we're always glad to see people coming home for the holidays, but we're seeing people come home for a lot more than that. We're seeing people choose and move to these locations in the Midwest that are seeing their potential realized as never before. 

That's something that that we are proud to help make possible through these infrastructure investments. We were just in Detroit where the leaders of transportation policy in 21 different economies - from Chile to Japan, all across the Asia-Pacific region - were gathering. 

I had a lot of fun explaining to them what it meant to be in the American Midwest, which might not have been obvious to the delegation from Indonesia or Hong Kong, but what I was able to tell was the story of a place that has a lot of pride, has a lot of good sense, and is committed to the kind of growth and prosperity that will only come from working together.  

And I am impressed, though not surprised, to see how everybody here is working together to deliver these results and we couldn’t be prouder to be teaming up with you.  

So, thanks for everything that you're doing, congratulations and so pleased to be here with you once again. 

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