The Bangor International Airport will soon have more than 800 new parking spaces to offer passengers.
The new lot will add 826 spaces to the airport’s parking arsenal, which now includes four lots for short and long term parking. The additional parking will sit on currently undeveloped land on Godfrey Boulevard, across the street from existing long term parking.
The Bangor City Council on Monday approved giving $6.5 million of the city’s unappropriated airport fund to build a new lot.
The additional space is needed because the airport’s passenger traffic has increased more than 30 percent in the past five years, likely due to pent-up demand to travel during the pandemic, according to Jose Saavedra, Bangor airport director.
Nearly 35,500 people passed through the Bangor airport in January, which was more than any January since 2020, according to data from Saavedra. January also capped a six-month stretch when the airport saw the highest monthly totals in the past five years.
The rise in passengers is a welcome change from the start of the pandemic in early 2020, when airport traffic plummeted 70 percent. Since then, passengers have slowly returned to traveling again, bringing airport numbers back to pre-pandemic levels.
In the past two years, the airport has seen more vehicles from November through May than they’re able to house in their existing lots, including a shuttle lot that’s typically used for vehicle overflow, Saavedra said. This has led the airport to use other lots that weren’t designed to hold vehicles, which isn’t a sustainable solution.
“We really are at such a high point of growth that we just need something to address the needs that we have.” Saavedra said.
The airport hopes to have the lot ready for use by Thanksgiving, Saavedra said.
