If you’ve been watching the soap opera playing out the past few months with Vero Beach Regional Airport as its backdrop, you’re probably wondering: Is this a real-life drama, or a slapstick comedy?
First, we want Elite Airways to stay in Vero Beach because it brings an $8 million economic impact. Then we’re kicking them out because they didn’t pay $35,000 during a pandemic.
We have a highly regarded airport director who, for more than two decades, has given us much more than our money’s worth. Then, because he made an inconsequential administrative error on a project that came in more than $1 million under budget, a city councilman wants to fire him.
And just in the past couple of weeks, we’ve had city officials scrambling to come up with a rates-and-fee plan to charge airlines that want to land at our airport – because Elite says it’s resuming service here this week, even though the airline was evicted by our City Council last month.
That is a lot of plot twists in a short period of time – enough to make you think the place is a screwed-up mess.
But it isn’t.
In fact, the airport – from an aviation perspective, anyway – appears to be just about as financially healthy as a city could hope for, given the impact of the coronavirus on businesses, locally as well as nationally.
Thus far this year, the airport has been approved for more than $2 million in federal grants, obtained a waiver that protects its state funding and created a fee structure that allows the city to charge any airline that uses the facility.
“The airport is in very good shape,” City Manager Monte Falls said. “Some positive things have happened out there, and we’re solving the problems that come up.”
The man solving most of the problems is Eric Menger, the city’s airport director for the past 24 years and Falls’ wingman in the aviation world. Together, they have managed to fly above the storms of controversy that have produced a sometimes-bumpy ride through City Hall.
Especially Menger.
In January, the City Council approved a two-year licensing agreement with Elite Airways to keep commercial passenger service in Vero Beach, despite the possibility the airport could lose as much as $1 million in state funding because the airline’s enplanements in 2019 had exceeded the 10,000-passenger threshold for a “general aviation” designation.
Led by Menger, city officials were able to postpone any such losses, scrambling to obtain in early February a waiver from the Florida Department of Transportation, which upgraded the airport’s designation to “commercial services” but agreed to delay for three years the accompanying changes to the way it funds projects in Vero Beach.
As a result, city officials now have until 2023 to find alternative funding – perhaps from Elite or other airlines – or convince the Florida Legislature to raise the FDOT passenger-boarding threshold separating “general aviation” and “commercial services” airports.
Menger has been working to solve that problem, too, organizing an ad hoc committee of six airport directors who want state legislators to address the passenger-boarding threshold issue. The group, which includes airport directors from Sarasota and Gainesville, has the backing of the Florida Airports Council’s executive board and has two lobbyists working on its behalf in Tallahassee.
In the meantime, Menger learned last week that our airport has been approved to receive $1.04 million in federal grant money as part of the FAA’s $10 billion recovery package, funded through the CARES Act.
That is significantly more than the $30,000 the FAA made available to Sebastian Municipal Airport and the $157,000 approved for Treasure Coast International Airport in St. Lucie County and Witham Field in Stuart.
Why so much more? The grant amounts are based on an airport’s size and number of flights, which means larger commercial airports get more money than smaller general aviation airports.
So, in an ironic twist, the city has ended up benefiting from Elite’s 10,000-plus enplanements, which pushed our airport into the “commercial services” designation the city had been trying to avoid.
It would make sense, then, for the City Council, which last month terminated its licensing and lease agreements with the Maine-based airline for its failure to pay $35,000 in overdue fees, to reconcile with Elite President John Pearsall.
The opportunity is there.
“Elite doesn’t want to leave Vero Beach,” Menger said.
After suspending flights between Vero Beach and Newark, N.J., last month because of the pandemic, and despite having been evicted from the airport, Elite informed city officials that it planned to resume service here this Friday.
“They don’t always do what they say they’re going to do,” Falls said, “but that’s what they’ve told us.”
The airline’s planned return to Vero Beach, however, forced city officials to scramble again – this time to come up with a rates-and-fees schedule that would lawfully permit the city to charge Elite, or any other airline, for using the airport’s terminal and facilities.
“If we don’t have an agreement in place,” Falls told members of the city’s Airport Commission last week, “we have no way to charge anyone to use our facility.”
FAA rules require any public airport that accepts federal grant money to allow any carrier to land and use its terminal and facilities. Refusing to do so would jeopardize the city’s ability to obtain future federal funding.
Needing to act quickly, City Attorney John Turner brought in a Colorado-based firm that specializes in airport law to draft a rate-and-fee structure, which provides airlines with two options – become a “permitted carrier” and get discounted rates, or operate as a “non-signatory carrier” and pay rates and fees that are 30 percent higher.
A “permitted carrier” would be required to pay just over $2,000 in monthly fees and a $750 ticket-counter fee, provide proof of insurance, and deposit into a city-held account the funds to cover three months’ of fees. Each time funds are withdrawn the airline must replenish the account within 30 days.
The airline also would be required to clear in advance any existing debt to the airport, which means Elite needed to pay to the city the $17,000 it still owes under the terms of its previous agreement. (The $35,000 would have covered the airline’s fees for the entire year, but the contract was terminated last month.)
Last week, the Airport Commission unanimously recommended the new rates-and-fees schedule, which the City Council was expected to approve at Tuesday’s meeting.
“It’s a very good document that protects the city,” Menger said, adding that he can’t help but be impressed with how quickly Falls and Turner have become familiar with airport operations. “I wish we had it when we started with Elite back in 2015, but we hadn’t had commercial airline service in 20 years.
“This agreement assures us that what happened with Elite not paying its bills won’t happen again, so we’re graduating to the next level.”
And as a graduation present, the city also received a $1 million FAA Entitlement grant this year. Unlike the CARES Act grant, which can be used to cover revenues lost because of the pandemic, the entitlement grant funds must be used for airport projects.
Still, that is a total of $2.04 million in federal grant money obtained this year for use at the airport. As a result of the FDOT waiver, the city also will stay on the right side of an 80-20 split in state-funded projects for the next three years.
Then there is the potential revenue generated by Elite, if it keeps Vero Beach on its route map or another airline moves in.
So, while what’s happening sometimes resembles a soap opera, the airport has been performing well with Menger’s character playing a leading role.
