Plans to extend the Wood County Airport runway to 5,000 feet have gone from impossible dream to tangible progress in the whirlwind of activity in recent months.

As a result, the airport’s annual meeting became a celebration Friday night.

Board chairman Randy Batemen said it is all because of one man.

“If I had one wish tonight, it was that Wayne Collins was standing here,” Bateman said.

The Mineola businessman and airplane enthusiast had a vision what this airport could be, Bateman said, and fought a lot of battles, things others would not have pursued.

In thinking about what Collins would do were he still here (he died in 2019), Bateman said he would be standing here with tears in his eyes and say ‘thank you, you’ve made my dream come true.’

The battle to extend the airport 1,000 feet to 5,000 and open it up to corporate jet traffic got an unexpected positive surprise this summer.

Bateman described the phone call he received from State Rep. Cole Hefner in June that an $8 million appropriation had been included in the new state budget and signed by the governor.

“It looks like we may be there,” Batemen said. “How excited Wayne would be tonight.”

The effort to extend the runway goes back more than 20 years.

The last five or six years has been a lot of hard work with one hurdle after another, he noted.

“It was an impossible battle,” Bateman said. “It was never going to happen.”

But even with the appropriation, there was still another hurdle – a 10% local match.

It was late in the budget cycle for the three partners, the cities of Quitman and Mineola and the county.

But all three managed to come up with their shares of the $800,000.

Bateman said this is probably the last and only chance the county will have to make this happen.

“It was a community effort,” he said. “We pulled together.”

Extending the runway will mean so much now but also for the county economically 20 or 30 years from now, he said.

Part of the celebration involved recognizing past board members with gifts.

They include Joel Moore, Glen Thurman, Lee Smith, Bob Hindman, Barney Terrell, and board secretary Lou Steele, who was acknowledged as the longest-serving board member, and is still serving.

Some of the airport’s history was on display with photos and newspaper clippings, which detailed opposition to the plans to built it in the late 1970s.

Bateman laid out a timeline for the construction.

Notices requesting proposals for engineering services are being published, with the target to have a firm selected in November. They will work about 60 days and then seek a contractor beginning in mid-January, with the plan to have a company on board by March and start moving dirt in April.

Noting the schedule is “real aggressive,” Bateman said the project could be completed by January 2025.

He noted that the project is being handled locally rather than through the Texas Dept. of Transportation, which could have taken up to four years.