"Jay Honeck" writes:

The city spends $170,000 per year (approximately) on the airport.
The Airport Manager -- a city employee with dubious and fuzzy duties
-- earns probably $50K of that. His assistant (the guy who does all
the work, mowing the lawns, etc.) has been with the city over 25
years, so he's probably making nearly $50K himself. But, of course,
there's no mention (either in the paper, or in City Hall) of
eliminating THAT expense.

The loan they are servicing is for a GIGANTIC maintenance hangar that a
previous FBO (PS Air, still operational in Cedar Rapids, IA) insisted on
having. Three years ago PS Air crapped out on the city, and literally
trucked everything up to Cedar Rapids in the middle of the night without
paying their rent.

That's net, after whatever the airport brings in? It would be
interesting to see a high-level P&L statement. It looks like HR is
the biggest expense, so a layoff would make sense -- the only danger
is that they'd give the airport manager several 100K in severance and
charge that to the airport as well.

The choice to build the big hangar is done, and the city is stuck
paying no matter what happens to the airport, just as they would be if
they had built a big sports stadium. Bad luck, dumb move, learn to
live with it, and try to learn from it. At least the hangar is a
cheaper mistake than a stadium by a couple of orders of magnitude.

How busy is your airport? If you weren't saddled with the expense of
the manager and the hangar loan, could you fund it from revenue?

It might make sense for the FBO (or more likely, a separate group
founded by the FBO, your hotel, and any other interested parties) to
go to the city and offer $1 to take over operations of the airport, on
the condition that the loan stays with the city. It wouldn't actually
do the city any fiscal good, but it would remove any cloud of doubt
over the airport itself, and the city and newspaper would be happy.
That would head off any attempt in the future to sell the airport to
build a subdivision, etc., if the city ends up more strapped for cash.


All the best,


David

--
David Megginson, , http://www.megginson.com/