BOSTON — The biggest investment in the nation’s infrastructure “since President Eisenhower’s interstate highway system” is getting off the ground in Boston where Logan Airport’s Terminal E is undergoing a major overhaul.
“Through the infrastructure law, we’re investing $62 million here at Logan — the largest grant for airport terminals in the country thus far, and one of the largest federal investments in airports ever, ever,” President Joe Biden said at a speech in the airport early Monday afternoon.
The $62 million was awarded to Logan through a grant program included in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, passed in November 2021.
The grant is slated to “fund improvements to Terminal E that were eliminated due to COVID-related financial constraints ($50 million) and improvements to critical terminal area roadways ($12 million),” according to the Massachusetts Port Authority.
A total $25 billion reinvestment in air travel throughout the country, the president said, will be a key piece of what he called an “infrastructure decade.”
Logan’s Terminal E, serving international flights, was built in 1974 and originally served 1.4 million people a year. Now it serves more than 5.6 million — meaning congestion, longer taxi times, flight delays, missed connections, spoiled products, unnecessary air pollution and so on, Biden said.
Though the U.S. “invented modern aviation,” it doesn’t currently have any of the top 25 airports in the world, Biden emphasized.
“We’re creating a modern terminal worthy of America’s ‘city on the hill,'” Biden said. “We will have a first-class airport here in very short order, folks.”
According to Massport, the project will support about 1,000 full-time jobs and add four international gates and a 500,000-square-foot building addition. The project will also upgrade the energy efficiency measures to meet a minimum 20% better than the Massachusetts Energy Code, among other provisions.
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