The deal struck between the Allegheny County Airport Authority and the evicted operator of the “airmall” at Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT) raises more questions than it answers.
As the Post-Gazette reports it, the authority will pay Fraport Pittsburgh $10.5 million to settle a Fraport lawsuit that claimed the authority ran roughshod over it and the law in the company’s June 2022 eviction.
Long story short, the Airport Authority booted Fraport, which has run PIT’s shopping mall under various names for decades, alleging security violations. Fraport denied the allegations. And an appellate court agreed. The Airport Authority, which had taken over as the mall’s operations manager, appealed to the state Supreme Court.
But why would the authority settle? Given the bill of particulars, decidedly not in the Airport Authority’s favor, it likely was well on its way to having its hat handed to it by the state Supreme Court.
And the P-G, through a Right-to-Know filing, learned the Airport Authority already had incurred $1.1 million in legal fees.
And why would Fraport settle if the odds were that it would win its case and reinstatement as the “airmall’s” operator? Not only did it more than double its go bye-bye money (though it was half of what it initially sought to do so), surely it was not fond of legal bills it was incurring to fight the Airport Authority.
But that said, given the arbitrary and capricious actions of the Airport Authority, it had a compelling case to recoup those legal costs.
The larger question, though, revolves around the origins of the settlement money.
As the P-G further reported:
“Airport Authority board chairman David Minnotte said during [an authority meeting last Friday] that the settlement would not involve any taxpayer money. It will come from the authority’s budget, which is largely funded by the airlines operating from Pittsburgh International.”
But that’s a tad too convenient to leave it at that. For the Airport Authority has a long history of talking semantically when it comes to the public’s money.
The simple fact of the matter is that the Allegheny County Airport Authority is a public authority and every single cent it takes in or disburses is a public cent.
While it might argue that no money paid by taxpayers is funding its $10.5 million settlement with Fraport, public money indeed is being used.
If it’s coming from fees paid by airlines to use PIT, we can’t imagine any of them are very happy about their remittances being used to pay off a company that PIT railroaded out of town.
Perhaps the settlement money is coming from natural gas wells on the PIT footprint. But that’s public money as well.
And if the Airport Authority is dipping into the money it receives from state-sanctioned gambling operations elsewhere, that, too, is public money.
In a written statement, authority solicitor Jeffrey Letwin said the settlement “is in the best interest of both parties.”
But what about the public?
An Airport Authority that a court said exceeded its legal authority is expending $10.5 million to extricate itself from a very expensive mess of its own making. The public has every right to know the source of every single cent of that $10.5 million.
And here’s a final question: Will the person or persons responsible for this Fraport cluster cluck be held accountable?
Well?
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
