"Push to take Hartsfield private abandoned"

Monday, June 16, 2003

Push to take airport private abandoned
By KIRSTEN TAGAMI
The Atlanta (GA) Journal-Constitution


The Fulton County Taxpayers Association has given up the fight to privatize
Hartsfield International Airport.

The nonpartisan anti-tax group had hoped to collect 28,000 signatures
petitioning the city to put the issue on a ballot. It fell short by about
10,000 signatures, said association President John Sherman.

Sherman still thinks it's a good idea to lease the city-owned airport to a
private company and use the money to repair the city's leaky sewers, which
is expected to cost $3 billion. But "the political leadership isn't there,"
he said.

A recent City Council report to Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin advised
against privatization. The report, by the head of the council's
Transportation Committee, H. Lamar Willis, cited opposition by Delta Air
Lines and AirTran Airways, which together control more than 80 percent of
the traffic at Hartsfield.

The Transportation Committee, which oversees the city-owned airport, held a
public meeting in December to discuss privatizing Hartsfield.

Federal law requires money made at commercial airports to be spent on the
airports. The only way Hartsfield revenue could find its way into the city's
general fund would be under a pilot privatization program run by the Federal
Aviation Administration.

Willis said privatizing the airport is a perennial issue that's likely to
come up again.

"You can never say it's dead, but what I would say is that its time is
definitely not now, and probably not in the near future, either," he said.

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