"Small Louisiana airports nab $40.7 million in two years"

["Stephen Irwin" <stepheni@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sunday, April 15, 2007 

Small Louisiana airports nab $40.7 million in two years
The Associated Press 


NEW ORLEANS -- Over the past two years, the federal government has handed
out $40.7 million to 40 airports in Louisiana that see no commercial travel,
a bill footed by passengers in the form of taxes and fees when they buy
their airline tickets, an Associated Press review found.

The airports range in size from New Orleans Lakefront Airport, once the
city's commercial airline hub, to smaller fields crisscrossing Louisiana
that serve private planes and charter flights.

Noncommercial flights pay a fuel tax as their share of supporting the
national air traffic system. Critics say the commercial passenger is footing
an enormously unfair percentage of the burden.

A move is under way in Congress to revamp the system, perhaps including
elimination or reduction of the passenger taxes and increases in fuel taxes
paid by those who fly the 4,500 planes registered in Louisiana. No
commercial airlines are based in the state.

According to figures from the Federal Aviation Administration, passengers
boarding flights at Louisiana's six commercial airports in New Orleans,
Baton Rouge, Lake Charles, Alexandria, Shreveport and Monroe have paid $230
million in taxes and fees on their tickets over the past decade.

Most of the smaller airports in Louisiana are listed as general aviation,
intended for such uses as serving leisure pilots, corporate and charter
flights, and various flight-related businesses, including crop-dusters.

Three airports, Lakefront, Slidell Municipal Airport and the Shreveport
Downtown Airport are listed as reliever airports, meaning they have a
specific mission to relieve commercial airports of congestion that smaller
planes would bring.

All have received money over the past two years from the FAA's Airport
Improvement Program. The money is supposed to be used for safety, increasing
capacity, security and environmental concerns, such as buying land to create
noise buffers. Most frequently the money is used for improvements and
repairs to runways. It is not supposed to be used for operational expenses.

Over the two-year period, Lakefront, which can handle huge military jets as
well as the smallest aircraft, received the most money of the noncommercial
airports in Louisiana: $13.2 million. Nearly $9.7 million of the money is
being used for erosion control at the airport, which sits on a manmade
peninsula jutting into Lake Pontchartrain.

At Slidell Municipal, which received $1.8 million from AIP in 2005, the
airport has just finished a 1,000-foot extension of its runway, said airport
manager Sam Carver. The airport is the home base for about 90 planes and
recorded 80,000 takeoffs and landings in 2006 while serving as a reliever
for Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport, he said.

"We try to plan for one big project a year," Carver said. "If they talk
about cutting the program, that puts those projects farther away."

The Shreveport Aviation Authority manages both the Shreveport Regional
Airport, a commercial facility, and the Shreveport Downtown Airport, which
serves general aviation. Authority spokesman Bill Cooksey said expensive and
critical infrastructure improvements will be needed at both types of
airports in the coming years, no matter how they are funded.

"The main issue is that there are a lot of funding needs that have to be met
for both commercial carrier airports and general aviation airports, which
are going to require a steady funding mechansim," he said.

Yvonne Chenevert, manager of the False River Regional Airport at New Roads,
which handles 50,000 takeoffs and landings a year, said one proposal under
consideration would raise aviation fuel taxes from about 19 cents a gallon
to about 70 cents a gallon, a change that would drive out many casual fliers
who currently pay the tax. As of last week, fuel retailed at False River for
$4.29 per gallon.

"It would cut out a lot of people," she said. "When times get tight, the
first thing that goes is your hobby or play toy."

But Chenevert said general aviation plays a critical business role in
Louisiana, a state that historically has one of the nation's worst highway
systems, four of its six major cities stuck out on each corner of the map
and few, if any, commercial flights that can easily link its commercial
aviation cities.

For instance, False River regularly hosts corporate jets that bring
executives to the many chemical plants located along the Mississippi River
between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. General aviation serves as a critical
backup "if someone calls and wants to have a business meeting in three
hours," she said.

To radically change the AIP funding system would be "throwing away 30 years
of policy that has been tested and proven to be beneficial to the public,"
Chenevert said.

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