"Philadelphia officials oppose state takeover of airport"

Saturday, October 16, 2004

City officials oppose state takeover of airport - The plan for a regional
authority would be costly and disruptive, they told a panel studying the
issue.
The Philadelphia (PA) Inquirer


Philadelphia International Airport isn't broken and doesn't need to be fixed
by creating a regional authority that would take control away from the city,
Philadelphia officials told a legislative commission studying the move
yesterday.

The city's leadoff witness, Commerce Director Stephanie Naidoff, said
Philadelphia was among very few major airports in the country to have gained
airlines and passengers and added terminals and gates since the Sept. 11,
2001, terrorist attacks sent the airline business into an economic tailspin.

"The city opposes any change of airport ownership or control, which we
believe would be extraordinarily expensive and would be more likely to cause
harm than to benefit the public," Naidoff said.

Officials from Tinicum Township, Delaware County, said they were worried
that property taxes would soar if changing the ownership meant that the
municipality and the Interboro School District would lose the $4 million a
year in revenue they get from the city. Two-thirds of the airport is in
Tinicum, which the city pays for the use of township land.

"We're being threatened with a major meltdown of our taxable real estate
base," township treasurer Richard E. Godbey testified.

The nine-member commission was created in June by the Pennsylvania
Legislature and appointed by House Speaker John Perzel, the Northeast
Philadelphia Republican who engineered previous state takeovers of the
Philadelphia Parking Authority and the Pennsylvania Convention Center
Authority. The House members on the panel also are charged with studying the
future of SEPTA and the Harrisburg and Pittsburgh airports.

More recently, Perzel has said that perhaps all the region's transportation
facilities and agencies - including the Delaware River Port Authority, the
port of Philadelphia, and the local operations of the Pennsylvania
Department of Transportation, in addition to the airport and SEPTA - should
be controlled by a state-run transportation authority.

Perzel has said he wants the airport to be run more efficiently, and to have
"a futuristic vision." The city, which operates the airport on a break-even
basis without using local tax revenue, could get as much as $1 billion from
the state if ownership and control were handed to a regional authority,
local and state officials have said.

Yesterday, Naidoff and city aviation director Charles J. Isdell outlined for
the commission how efficient they said the airport was now, and detailed the
plans already in place for the 2,300-acre facility.

Isdell ticked off a long list of awards the airport has gotten for the way
it is run and for its retail concessions program. The airport has stable
credit ratings from the three leading bond-rating agencies, Fitch, Moody's
and Standard & Poor's, which have praised airport management for being
experienced and capable, he said.

The airport "is an economic, customer-service and community-relations
success story for the entire region," he said.

Answering questions from the legislators, Isdell said that, even if bankrupt
US Airways Group Inc., the airport's dominant carrier, with two-thirds of
the traffic, were to go out of business, the airport still would attract 20
million to 22 million passengers a year because of the region's large
population. This year, the airport expects more than 26 million passengers.

One witness, airport consultant Robert A. Hazel, supported the call for a
regional authority. In 1991, Hazel, then a US Airways senior vice president,
represented airlines that endorsed creation of a regional airport authority.

"Many state and local governments have drawn the same conclusion that the
airlines drew in 1991 about Philadelphia - specifically, that managing an
airport is a highly specialized function and one that a properly structured
airport authority is better equipped to handle," he said.


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