The mayor of Merritt says the city wants to realize the potential of its local airport.

Linda Brown says the topic touched down again last week when a longtime pilot presented at council – who also requested that an airport manager be hired.

“That certainly was a piece of it. I’m not sure that we jumped on the manager right away. We need to do an awful lot of work before that, clean up the runway, get a taxi run in there which means a change to the Official Community Plan. There’s a lot of background work that we need to do, so the manager is not the top priority that’s for sure.”

Brown says Merritt may eventually pursue having passenger planes fly in and out, and she says it would be a dream to have the airport compete with the Coquihalla.

She says groups have been looking at getting the airport certified for a long time, and this year the city is spending $25,000  this year to create an airport master plan.