October
2008
Airport User
Fees
Those guys from the newspaper come
in here every day looking for an
announcement. Theyre expecting
Ill tell them soon about throwing
my hat in the ring for the mayors
chair. Im the logical choice to run
the show here. After all, it was
me that got the MLA elected, and
Ive been in this town for 30 years,
so I know whats going on.
The barber rambled on and on about his
accomplishments, mostly in politics, as I
sat there a prisoner in his chair one
afternoon in July. The rain was
falling in this northern British Columbia
town where I was based while flying on a
seasonal forestry job. The
conversation was one-sided, and as time
passed, I began to wonder how much hair
would remain on my head by the time
another customer came in to save me from
this guy.
He could talk up a storm, mostly about
his thoughts and ideas of how the town
should be, the world should turn, how bad
the kids are today, the economy, fuel
prices, the weather, and how much better
it would all be if he became the mayor in
the next election. Yup, he would
make the perfect politician. I
thought with talk like that,
everyone would vote for him, except
perhaps the other barber in the shop, who
heard it all before on a daily
basis.
At one point, there was enough of a break
in his blabbering that I was able to
squeeze in a question about the user fees
his town had slapped on at their airport.
It happens to be one of the towns
that inherited the facility from
Transport Canada several years ago.
Faced with the cost of upkeep,
their natural reaction was to start
collecting more money from the businesses
and aircraft owners, as well as
implementing landing and parking fees for
itinerant pilots. He immediately
jumped to the defense of the council,
re-stating the short-sighted reasoning
they all use about how the rich people
with airplanes should pay for it all.
There was no listening to the
indirect benefits brought to a city by
aviation. The obvious extra
traffic in hotels, restaurants, even in
his barber shop simply didnt
compute in his mind with people using the
airport. If it were not for the
strategic location of the town, I
suggested even the government, forestry
and mining flight operations would seek
out a base offering lower costs.

The local municipal government in that
town as well as many others, will
sometimes hear none of the reasoning or
the facts uncovered through economic
impact studies that have already been
done. It is quite simply a
matter of paying directly for the use of
that runway and parking area by the pilot
who uses it. The comparison of a
direct charge for the city street that a
motorist drives on just doesnt
occur to these people.
The
company that employed me to fly was
charged a fee close to $14 each time I
landed at that airport. There was
also an $8.00 fee to park on their ramp
overnight. We used the airport for
the better part of three months. Do the
math and see why a company flying even a
small plane like a Cessna 182 would
choose to utilize another location if it
were available. Meanwhile, I was
living at a motel and eating at
restaurants in the town. With the
taxi to and from the airport, the daily
cost not including the landing/parking
fees, totaled $154. Consider the
people employed in just those services.
The motel and restaurant staff and
the taxi driver are all tax-paying
residents of the town.
Obviously,
the money from our company didnt
totally support the entire industry of
that town, but there was a forest fire
operations base there, along with a
couple of helicopter providers, an air
freight/courier, and two charter/schedule
airlines. The fuel dealer was also
paying several cents to the municipality
from every liter he sold. A rough
estimate of the people involved in the
work from that airport would be one
hundred. If each employee shoveled
out the basics of $150 daily as I was, it
doesnt take a rocket scientist to
see the economic benefit of that airport
to the town. This is all very
unscientific of course. But impact
studies have been done for many
municipally-owned airports around the
country which show results that an
open-minded person, even a politician
could not brush aside. Its a
matter of listening to the facts before
making up their minds.
The
barber who wants to become the mayor was
too busy talking to be listening to
anything. His little towns
airport is doing well only because of the
strategic location it enjoys.
However, there is already evidence of
pilots and companies avoiding it as much
as possible. They find other
places to purchase fuel, make do with
slightly longer flights, and change with
the times to keep operating expenses
down. For almost the entire
summer, my 182 sat alone on that huge
ramp. But what hurt most about my
encounter with the barber was the next
morning when the fuel dealer asked me,
Whered you get that
HAIRCUT?!
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