The City of Chico has been awarded a Small Community Air Service Development grant for the Chico Municipal Airport. That grant is from the U-S Department of Transportation. The grant program is designed to provide financial assistance to smaller communities in order to help them enhance their air service. The grant program is limited to 40 grant awards with a maximum of four grants per state. According to City Manager Mark Orme, the grant will help deliver some of the necessary improvements to keep the area moving in the right direction for years to come.

The City of Chico has also applied for two separate grants as an effort to attract commercial air service.

One of those is a 14 million dollar Federal Aviation Administration grant to completely rehabilitate the runway at the Chico Municipal Airport. The second is an Economic Development Administration program disaster recovery grant, which would provide funding to widen Cohasset Road from Eaton Road to Ryan Avenue, according to a news release from the City of Chico.