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Follow TURFMillionaire travel uninterrupted: TxDOT takeover of municipal airports
Millionaire travel uninterrupted: Texas taxpayers to takeover municipal airports
By Terri Hall
Examiner.com
April 1, 2013
It sounds like something you’d hear on April Fool’s Day, but in Texas, Governor Rick Perry and his highway department are quite serious. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) just announced it plans to takeover operations of 13 municipal airports across the state that have lost federal funding due to cuts triggered by sequestration.
Perry asked TxDOT to temporarily pay for air traffic controllers, presumably, for public safety, but it’s no coincidence that the governor and his Transportation Commissioners jet set into and out of these small airports for state business, though commercial air travel is much more cost effective for taxpayers. It appears this airport stopgap will directly benefit the governor and his highway commissioners. Perry also uses these airports for campaign travel, especially when he ran for president in 2012.
Is this really an ‘emergency’? The primary clientele at municipal airports are corporate jets. So between the state travel and corporate millionaires, few Texans will see this as a legitimate ‘emergency’ that warrants millions in state taxpayer dollars.
Taking over airport operations expands TxDOT’s role in aviation. Up until now, the department’s aviation division simply built runways and taxiways for these municipal airports. Now it’s venturing into actual operations of the airports at a time when TxDOT’s budget is cash-strapped and will run out of money to build and maintain Texas highways beyond next year. To add salt to the wound, Perry drained $2.6 million in state gas taxes for his presidential campaign travel in order to pay for his security detail.
Certainly the 25 million Texans that depend on state highways for daily living would put a higher priority on building and maintaining our roads than it would on bailing out the federal government’s responsibility to pay air traffic controllers who staff these small airports and to keep what amounts to corporate airports that also accommodate government jet-setting open.
The Transportation Commission will hold an emergency special meeting April 4 to approve expending funds to maintain the air traffic control operations at these 13 airports. The Commission will re-evaluate the program after 90 days. TxDOT Executive Director Phil Wilson says he hopes the federal government will resolve the operational funding of these airports by then.
Considering gas taxes are the primary source of funding for TxDOT, this is yet another diversions of road taxes for non-road purposes, an abuse that's stirred up the grassroots for decades. So once again it's taxpayers who are being played the fool on this April Fool's Day.