MAJOR upgrades are being proposed for the Dubbo City Regional Airport, which could provide a big incentive for businesses to relocate to the city.
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Dubbo City Regional Airport operations manager Lindsay Mason said the plan was to make more land available in the future to use as aircraft hangars or for other aviation business development.
Council's draft budget for the 2015/2016 financial year has earmarked $580,000 to provide drainage infrastructure to connect to a new general aviation area, and to install closed circuit TV cameras around the terminal precinct.
"$560,000 of next year's budget will be spent on roads and drainage in an area of the airport east of the Royal Flying Doctor Service," Mr Mason said.
"We have no hangar space left in the current general aviation area so we are looking to expand to a new area."
At the moment, Mr Mason said, council was having to knock back requests from private and business operators who wanted hangar space at the airport.
"There is plenty of demand for it," he said.
"We have a guy here in Dubbo who has a business in another regional area, so he flies backwards and forwards between Dubbo and Wagga. There are all sorts of instances like that.
"In the past we've had to turn people away because we simply don't have the land available for them to put a hangar up. The roads and drainage work is the first step in the process and will allow for future development of this area.
"Certainly we do have a lot of water that flows down there, a big part of it (the project) is drainage so we'll sort that out before we develop there."
Dubbo mayor Mathew Dickerson said the extension could pave the way for businesses that incorporated air services, such as mining, charter and maintenance operations, to relocate to Dubbo or expand using Dubbo as a base.
"There are painting and construction firms already here that have their own planes to fly workers to jobs in western NSW," he said.
"If you have, say, a team of four painters going to a job in Walgett, it's a lot of man hours to have them sitting in a car all the way there and back when you could fly them there in 40 minutes and have them ready to be on the job first thing that morning."
Work on the upgrades was expected to start after July.
