The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has “very significant safety and efficiency concerns” about the Allegheny County Airport Authority’s proposal to close the longest runway at Pittsburgh International Airport (PIT), reports the Post-Gazette.
But the real kicker here is that when the P-G first reported on the proposal — in mid-February and part of a new master plan for the Findlay Township facility — authority boss Christina Cassotis made no specific mention of the FAA’s concerns.
And it wasn’t as if she didn’t know: The P-G report says the agency notified the authority of just those concerns in a Nov. 1, 2017, letter to Cassotis.
Worse, it took a Freedom of Information filing by the newspaper – to the FAA — to shake loose that pertinent nugget. Back in February, the FAA only would say it was aware of the runway-shutdown proposal and that it would have the final say.
In the least, the optics of this are lousy. They suggest the airport authority withheld critical information from the public as it first began to explore the runway elimination.
That this information was withheld from the public for four and a half months – and that it was only disclosed at the behest of third party — was a disservice to the public.
If a master plan makes a recommendation, and that recommendation comes with almost instant baggage, the public should have been informed – immediately, automatically and as a matter of sound public policy.
Speaking of the Allegheny County Airport Authority, its largest (to date) foray into command economics is not going very well. Surprise, surprise and ahem.
The grand command plan for this attempted one-year joint venture – in which taxpayers yet again have been turned into venture capitalists – was for Qatar Airways to carry 60 tons of cargo per round-trip oversees flight, serving the Mideast and, by extension, Europe.
But as the Tribune-Review reports, Qatar carried only 114 tons (U.S.) of cargo in January. Had it reached its goal, that volume would have been 360 tons. Thus, January’s tonnage was less than a third of its goal.
And taxpayers are forking over a small fortune for this failure – an incredible $15,500 — for each round trip?
In the wild and crazy world of government mocking markets, the Trib also notes:
“If the carrier continues to fall below its goal in the second six months, which starts April 12, the airport authority will continue to pay $15,500 per flight. That would mean the carrier would receive $1.46 million after a full year of service, which would be the largest incentive the airport has awarded an airline.”
There’s a very precise economics phrase for such an arrangement: “This is nuts” – nonperformance-based corporate wealthfare. Intellectual vapidity has reached a new low.
The airport authority stresses that two salespeople have been hired, on the job only beginning in February, to market the cargo route. One would think that effort would have begun, uhm, oh, before the service bowed, based on demand and not public subsidies?
The Trib, which had to pry loose the contract for this very suspect deal through an open records filing with the commonwealth, reminds that while Qatar, in a September news release, said it planned to carry 100 tons per flight, the agreement listed the carrier’s goal at 60 tons per round-trip flight.
Bottom line: A public authority has no business picking the public’s pockets for such speculative enterprises. Period.
And there’s yet more Allegheny County Airport Authority news. The Trib says its exploring the idea of building a natural gas-fired “microgrid” to power Pittsburgh International Airport and manufacturing companies on its property.
Authority chief Christina Cassotis says the project would be a “public-private partnership” and that 60 firms already have submitted qualifications. The deadline is March 30.
A key to moving forward will be cost-efficiency, Cassotis stresses; namely, if it’s cheaper than Duquesne Light’s service, the current power provider. And, she adds, solar energy also could be in the mix.
CNX Resources Corp., the old Consol Energy, already is extracting shale gas from airport property.
Sounds encouraging. But, of course, past being prologue (think the runway-elimination matter), there’s a wee bit of a major operative question here:
What is the public not being told?
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
