The state's largest airport is adding some badly needed bathrooms to its concourse.

The bathrooms for men and women, as well as two family restrooms, will join the eight bathrooms already at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field, only half of which are on the concourse.

Construction is expected to begin in August and be complete by May, said Shane Carter, an airport spokesman.

The Lease and Consultant Selection Committee of the Little Rock Municipal Airport Commission, which oversees the airport, voted to recommend the awarding of a $2.1 million contract to Flynco Inc. to build the bathrooms near Gate 5 of the concourse.

The contract also includes separate construction items unrelated to the bathroom construction.

Those items include new supply and return chill water lines from the central plant to locations along the concourse to supply existing and new heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems; repairs to the concrete tug tunnel; and mechanical modifications to provide infrastructure for the airport's proposed distributed antenna system to improve mobile telephone reception within the airport.

The new bathrooms will be removed when the concourse is expanded, but that is several years away. As part of the concourse expansion, new bathrooms need to be installed, because the expansion will begin on the west end of the concourse, where existing bathrooms are located.

"We first decided not to do it, but when we saw how difficult it was to get more money and the cost escalation of our other phases, we decided to do it now because we could use it," said Bob East, the Lease and Consultant Selection Committee chairman. "We thought long and hard about spending the money."

Airport spokesman Shane Carter said building the temporary bathrooms now was more cost effective. "We were going to need to do this anyway, so do it now and get a longer life out of it," he said.

The airport's other restrooms underwent $700,000 in modifications during an earlier phase of the airport's $67 million project to remake the passenger terminal. However, they were not expanded.

"The restrooms today are small," said Ron Mathieu, the airport's executive director. "We didn't make them bigger, we made them better. We can add more restrooms and use them for the next five, six or seven years, or however long it may be. It's a significant upgrade."

Metro on 07/10/2014