Upgrading Airports

I must confess that I’m not a particular fan of the Department of Transportation as a regulator of the airline industry and protector of the public interest.

In one area of its operation, of which I have been critical, I may have been unfair.

I’m talking about the Aviation Trust Fund, the money accruing from the 8% tax on domestic airline tickets and from certain international departure taxes. The money is intended solely to upgrade and expand airports, runways, flight-control equipment and the like.

That fund now stands at $10.6 billion, and is growing at an impressive rate.

Not only are our dollars still being plowed into it every time we travel (an estimated $3.5 billion in fiscal ‘87-’88), but the interest alone this year is expected to be more than $1 billion.

It’s the department’s job to put that money to the use for which it was intended, and it hasn’t been doing it.

I always felt that the department’s failure to make proper use of the funds was simply another manifestation of bureaucratic procrastination. Or worse--incompetence. But I was wrong.

Committee Won’t Release It

Indications are that the money is lying idle in the general coffers not because the department refuses to spend it but because Congress, or at least the House Appropriations Committee, refuses to release it.

The committee lets the money gather interest because it makes the country’s budget deficit look a bit less bad. It’s being used to offset a lot of red ink accumulated in other areas of government spending.

By law, that money may only be used to improve our aviation system. What the committee is doing seems barely legal.

Members of the committee always manage to defeat efforts to separate the fund from the general ledger by arguing that recent spending reduction laws make it impossible to do so.

The department thus far has spent everything that those who dole out the money will allow, and it would love to spend more.

But how to pry it free from the appropriations people?

The House Aviation Subcommittee, which is charged with identifying the priorities that the department is supposed to consider when investing the fund money, has tried. Each year it giveth . . . and the Appropriations Committee taketh away.

Late last year the subcommittee finally succeeded in making a small dent in the appropriations process. It managed to get a law passed that would require no less than 85% of the fund money it authorizes in the next two years to be spent.

If not, for whatever reason, even if blocked by the Appropriations Committee, the ticket tax will automatically be cut in half to 4%. The cut would slow the growth of the Aviation Trust Fund and, in theory, reduce the incentive to keep it on the books as a general-ledger item.

Overhaul Needed

Meanwhile, our airways badly need an overhaul. An airport hasn’t been built in nearly 15 years, even though our old ones are bursting at the seams. Nobody has even completed a major runway construction project in that period.

Also, the volume of air traffic continues to rise. In the first half of this decade it grew 36%, in 1986 8% and 10% last year.

Even if our air system is safe now, it soon will start deteriorating unless we do something to upgrade our handling capability. And that, of course, means money . . . lots of it.

Ask any aviation or avionics expert. The technology exists right now to improve the system significantly.

What can you do? For starters, let your elected representatives know that you don’t want to pay into a specific fund if it is only going to be used as a crutch to prop up the national budget.

Put it to them simply, like: “Our airways system needs expensive repairs. We’ve got the money . . . now spend it.”

The Department of Transportation is suggesting that travelers holding unused tickets on Aeromexico, which has declared bankruptcy, contact the airline for possible refunds.

“We’ve been told the airline will issue refunds, but there is no guarantee,” said a DOT spokesman.

Contact the airline at Aeromexico, 8390 N.W. 53rd St., Suite 311, Miami, Fla. 33166. The phone number is (305) 592-1300.

Be sure to make a photocopy of tickets sent into Aeromexico when seeking a refund, the DOT spokesman added.