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CAA: Airport News, "Fayetteville, Arkansas airport's future takes the stage in mayor's race"
Sunday, March 5, 2000
Fayetteville: Airport's future takes the stage in mayor's race
LAURA KELLAMS
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
FAYETTEVILLE -- Drake Field's full-time marketing manager was one of the
first employees fired after commercial airlines began making their final
departures from the city airport.
Now, a year later, a renewed focus on marketing is hailed as the likely
savior of the fading airport. With it, the first hot issue of the
Fayetteville mayoral race has emerged.
Mayor Fred Hanna last week appointed a committee to find ways to
increase business at Drake Field. The irony of having fired the marketing
director a year ago is not lost on him, Hanna said Friday.
Staff cuts were necessary, and the diverse committee will take marketing
of the airport in a different direction, he said.
"Last year, people actually believed all the airlines weren't going to
leave," Hanna said. Some wanted the marketing manager, Rudy Furr, to
persuade airlines to stay instead of transferring their business to the new
Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Highfill. That was already a lost
cause, Hanna said.
City administrators, the City Council and the Airport Board were pushing
marketing efforts in different directions, Hanna said.
Now, for the first time in years, everyone seems to agree that wooing
general-aviation businesses -- private pilots, corporate tenants, aviation
industries -- is the way to make the airport self-supporting again.
Rick McKinney, the Airport Board chairman, said the city administration
has been slow to come around to the idea of increasing marketing efforts.
While he won't go so far as to blame the mayor in particular, McKinney said
the administration has not done enough to shift the airport into a center of
general aviation.
"The board has been asking, almost to the point of pleading, for an
organized marketing effort," he said. "That has fallen on deaf ears."
It took board members like Charles Wallace asking for help and political
pressure in an election year to bring the city administration around,
McKinney said.
Dan Coody, one of two candidates opposing Hanna in his re-election bid,
made the first speech of his campaign at the airport last month. At a press
conference, he said as mayor he would do more to market the airport for
general-aviation businesses.
"When I made it a political issue, it became expedient for the
administration to take the marketing of Drake Field more seriously," Coody
said Friday.
The city airports in Springdale and Rogers are successful as
general-aviation airports.
"Ours is better," Coody said. "There's no good reason why it's
languishing out here. It's simple lack of leadership."
Asked if Coody's press conference helped spur his recent focus on
marketing, Hanna said, "Who? I don't pay any attention to what he has to
say."
Hanna said it's important to understand that city officials and airport
employees are "doing a 180" in attitude about general aviation.
"For 25 or 30 years, we've been discouraging private plane owners and
encouraging commercial airlines," he said. Private pilots were never
actively solicited, and now they're the main focus.
"You've got to change attitudes that have been instilled in people,"
Hanna said. "It's not easy to reverse courses all of a sudden."
Wallace, an airport board member appointed to the mayor's new marketing
committee, said he and Hanna have been talking about marketing efforts for
some time.
"I just decided a few months ago that we were either going to take a new
direction or stagnate where we were," Wallace said.
The airport has about $2.8 million in the bank, left over from years of
budget surpluses during its heyday. Wallace said he wants city officials to
spend the money to "make something happen," to market the airport. That way,
when the money runs out, Drake Field will be in a position to be
self-sustaining, he said.
The Arkansas Department of Aeronautics reports that most of the state's
general-aviation airports are subsidized by city governments. Ten of 83 are
self-supporting.
"We ought to be the 11th," Wallace said.
All the talk of whose idea it was and who supports the airport more
isn't doing Drake Field a whole lot of good, Wallace said.
"The most difficult thing is everyone seems to be living in the past.
Any discussion seems to drift back to who did what to whom," Wallace said.
The new committee includes Wallace, a pilot and Airport Board member;
Jim Benton, a pilot who is a tenant on the field; Dale Frederick, the
airport manager; and Alett Little, the city's economic development director.
The combined efforts of people from different backgrounds will generate new
ideas for attracting more airport business, which will generate new revenue
sources, Wallace said.
"We can't just wait for something to happen," he said.
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