Plan to Shift Airport Management Alarms Civic, Aviation Groups

An announcement that Ventura County supervisors are considering eliminating the department that manages the Camarillo and Oxnard airports has triggered alarm among local aviation officials and civic leaders.

At the suggestion of Supervisor John K. Flynn, the Board of Supervisors decided this week to consider putting both airports under management of the county public works agency and eliminating the post of airports administrator, which has been vacant since the end of December.

Supervisors also abruptly decided at the meeting Tuesday to cancel interviews that had been set up this week with seven candidates for the administrator’s job.

Flynn emphasized Thursday that county officials have so far made no decision on the proposed merger but are merely examining the possibility.

“We need to try to find a more efficient way to manage” the airports, he said.

But the proposal has riled Camarillo and Oxnard civic leaders, business people and pilots, who argue that the airports need to be managed by a staff experienced in both business and aviation, rather than by a county department whose expertise is in maintaining roads and public buildings.

“This is very dangerous in terms of the efficient operation of the airport,” Camarillo City Councilman David Smith said. “The airport is not like another building. It’s an ongoing business and requires someone who has experience in business.”

Oxnard Airport alone pumps an estimated $20.8 million into the local economy. And Camarillo Airport generates $29.5 million in spending on local goods and services.

“That’s a big piece of Camarillo’s business,” said Wally Boeck, a member of the Camarillo Chamber of Commerce board. “We as a community have a huge resource out there.”

In addition to being a businessman, Boeck is a pilot and member of the Ventura County Aviation Advisory Commission, which advises the county on airport issues.

Merging the airports administration into the public works agency could save an estimated $180,000 to $220,000, county officials said.

But the savings would not benefit taxpayers by helping to alleviate the budget crisis: The county is forbidden by law from tapping into any of the revenues generated at Camarillo Airport, the only one of the two airports that makes money.

Instead, county officials said they would funnel savings from the merger into airport improvements.

But Boeck and other aviation officials charge that the proposed merger is a ploy by the county to replace airport staff with public works personnel who would be paid from airport revenues, thus reducing county payroll costs.

Indeed, Public Works Director Arthur E. Goulet first presented the merger proposal in a March, 1993, memo that identifies several airport staff positions that could be eliminated. The memo also indicates that at least one of the airport jobs, an engineering position, could be filled by a public works staff member.

However, Goulet said Thursday that the public works department was overstaffed at the time he wrote the memo, a situation that is no longer the case.

“This is not an attempt to gain revenue for the public works agency,” he said. “It is just a look to see if there are some ways of affecting economies” in the airport management.

Eliminating the airport administrator position would alone save an estimated $90,000 in salary and benefits, he said.

In addition, the reorganization would allow the county to eliminate some of the other 31 staff positions at the airport by merging finance, clerical and other functions performed in both agencies. The workers in these eliminated positions would either be laid off or transferred to other county departments, Goulet said.

Opponents of the merger also say they are concerned that the move would strip the airports of their relative independence.

Because the county owns the two airports, the Board of Supervisors already has ultimate control over their operation.

But the existence of a separate airport department whose administrator and staff work from offices at Camarillo Airport instead of at the massive County Government Center gives the airports a certain amount of autonomy that would be lost through a merger into the public works agency, opponents say.

“Currently, it’s being operated independently, and it’s getting the kind of attention that it needs,” Oxnard Councilman Michael Plisky said. “It’s just going to get buried in bureaucracy in Ventura.”

If control of the airports were transferred to the public works agency, Plisky said, pilots and other airport users would have less access to airport management. “It would be less responsive to public needs,” he said.