17 AirportImprovement.com September 2026 TERMINALS FCA “They’re quite familiar with how to work in the winter out here,” Forgays notes. “We didn’t get too much of an impact from weather because we teamed up with the right folks.” Q&D had supervisors onsite and its project management leads traveled to FCA regularly. Swank provided or oversaw most of the local trade workers. Balancing construction timelines with available capital was sometimes like a high-stakes chess match due to COVID-related price increases on almost all materials. Ratkowski says the airport “pulled out every stop we could” to obtain the money necessary to complete each phase in a timely manner. In addition to its own funds, the airport used FAA Airport Improvement Program entitlement dollars collected over the course of five years. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Airport Terminals Program also provided federal money, as did TSA’s Checked Baggage Inspection System program. Some debt was incurred, with the airport using future Passenger Facility Charge proceeds to secure $70 million in loans from a consortium of local banks. Extremely low COVID-era interest rates helped reduce the monthly payments, and no bonds were issued, notes Ratkowski. Leaving a Legacy Looking back on a project that occupied several years of his professional life, 52-year-old Ratkowski describes the recent improvements at FCA as the pinnacle of his career. Everyone from the airport’s 50+ employees to its hired contractors and subs more than pulled their weight, he adds. Forgays says he’ll reflect fondly for years on the end results, calling the new FCA “one of the most beautifully tied-in pieces of architecture I’ve seen. It really speaks to the region.” For Dubbe, a Montana native who now lives in Minneapolis, the lasting afterglow will include memories about those who performed the work. From Day One, the subcontractors looked at the project as if it were “almost their moral imperative to do something they could be proud of, that someone who came there would know and intuitively love,” he explains. “We had fourth-generation masons on the job whose grandfather came out and said, ‘I laid this stone here.’ Those things really mattered.”
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