"Louisiana airport study revives interest locally"

Sunday, April 1, 2001

Airport study revives interest locally
By Joan McKinney
The Advocate - Baton Rouge, Louisiana


If you’re still harboring ideas about a big new airport for new passenger
service in south Louisiana, don’t even go there.

That seemed to be the message last week from top Federal Aviation
Administration officials. The federal officials are willing to at least
study the feasibility of a new airport for cargo. But they think that a new
passenger facility is not -- and should not be -- included in the current
planning.

The federal officials’ view is important for many reasons. First, the
existing New Orleans and Baton Rouge airports already oppose a Louisiana
Airport Authority proposal to build a huge, intermodal (connected to rail,
highway and water) airport for cargo. Adding a passenger component to the
project would seriously raise the competitive stakes for the existing
airports.

Second, several Louisiana congressmen hinted last year that they might
support construction of a new passenger airport, if New Orleans didn’t agree
to share management control of its airport with surrounding parishes. The
passenger airport threat -- or implied threat -- seemed to evaporate when
the authority and the FAA agreed to do a "risk-analysis" of building a new
airport geared to cargo.

But third is the question: Is new passenger service really off the table?
"Why should we take anything off the table?" Authority Chairman Glen Smith
asked during a recent interview in Washington. Smith and authority
colleagues said repeatedly that their current risk-analysis study is focused
on cargo. But they wouldn’t say, flatly, that they’ve totally abandoned any
notion of future passenger service.

This may be fiscal caution. "Risk analysis" implies that you’re trying to
find out if your proposed development will earn enough money to justify
private-investor risks and taxpayer risks. Passengers would add another
revenue stream (as well as another set of costs) to a new airport.

The authority has hired a private consultant to do its risk-analysis study.

Some history could be illuminating: Seven years ago, a private consultant
did a feasibility study for LAA and laid out several scenarios for the
optimal functioning of a new intermodal airport. The authority’s consultant
reported that the new airport, on what was then the model, might best
function if the Baton Rouge and New Orleans airports became "reliever" or
"commuter" airports.

Last week, Paul L. Galis, deputy associate administrator for airports at the
FAA, gave this interpretation of that old report:

"In 1994, LAA concluded that a project is feasible, if in fact, we carved
away passengers from New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and transferred all of
that passenger activity to this new intermodal facility.

"We (the federal agency) suggest that this underlying assumption of
transferring passenger activity from Baton Rouge and New Orleans is probably
not a reasonable assumption. It’s not a valid proposal to base this kind of
a project on."

Consequently, Galis said, the federal agency would be very surprised, and
very skeptical, if any consideration of future passenger traffic creeps into
the LAA’s new "risk analysis" study. At one time, some factions floated the
passenger concept again, Galis said; but, today, the federal agency has been
led to believe that "we really, truly are now talking about a cargo
facility. ... To those who still believe that somehow this thing could be
made to accommodate passengers ... we should report that we don’t believe
that will happen."

The authority, of course, isn’t basing its revived proposal on 1994 data. It
has tried to reassure Baton Rouge and New Orleans that, in today’s world of
international trading, a new cargo airport and its on-site manufacturing
park isn’t a competitive threat. It would only bring new traffic to the
nearby, older airports, according to LAA.

A year ago, U.S. Rep. Richard Baker, R-Baton Rouge, and officials of the
Baton Rouge airport were a little complacent. They believed that the revived
talk of the airport was just another one of those unfathomable political
fights between New Orleans and its suburban neighbors. Now, Baker and others
say that the LAA has done a good job explaining its project, convincing some
officials that the new airport stands on its own merits. And people really
took notice when the LAA asked for state funds to help pay for the
risk-analysis study.

"If that (complacency) were a problem last year, it’s not a problem now,"
Baker said last week.

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