A plan to privatize the county’s airport is ready to go through a more rigorous vetting process after lawmakers collectively pumped the breaks on a previous version by Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, a Republican.
Earlier this month, consultants hired by the county presented a plan to send out a request for proposal, RFP, for a multi-million dollar deal privatizing the Westchester County Airport that was sent down by the administration late last year just before the passage of the 2017 county budget.
Dan Branda, a spokesperson for the county, declined to say what type of interest the county has received for the airport, if any. Lawmakers plan to have the RFP out by the end of the month.
Absent from the most recent version of the plan, however, is an exclusive deal with the investment firm Oaktree Capital Management, which was previously slated by Astorino in November 2016 to become the sole operator of the county-owned airport.
After criticism from lawmakers who accused the Oaktree deal of skirting proper bidding procedure, it was eventually sidelined from the county budget, but a new proposal, resulting from the RFP process, will be vetted by lawmakers who hope to finalize a plan before the passage of the 2018 budget later this year.
According to a schedule proposed by the county’s hired consultants, all proposals to operate the county’s airport would have to be submitted by July with a final deal potentially in place by November 2017.
Adding pressure on lawmakers will be $15 million in prospective revenue from the plan that was going to be used to help balance the 2017 budget; that money has become an increasingly critical piece of the county’s fiscal future amidst projections of waning sales tax revenue and burdensome health care costs.
Lawmakers are still hoping to transfer extra revenue from any potential airport deal this year into the county’s general budget in order to deal with ongoing fiscal shortfalls.
But in order to redirect revenue from the airport, lawmakers will have to register it through a Federal Aviation Administration, FAA, privatization program; a process that was initiated last year.
Before the county can execute on its plan, the FAA must approve the process. In some cases, approval processes have dragged on for years.
Of the 10 airports that applied to the FAA’s program since its introduction in 1996, only one—Luis Muñoz Marín airport in Puerto Rico—has completed the process and has since remained privatized.
Currently, under federal law, any revenue earned at the airport can only be used for airport-related purposes.
Many of the county lawmakers, who had previously criticized the deal’s last minute introduction—it was sent down to legislators for approval less than a month before the budget deadline—and lack of bidding process, have since changed their attitudes toward the plan.
“The Board of Legislators insisted that any deal to privatize our county’s airport had to result from a fair and open bidding process,” said Mary Jane Shimsky, a Hastings-on-Hudson Democrat, who initially opposed the privatization plan. “In my mind, only deals that properly address… the county’s long-term financial interests, the traveling public, the neighboring communities and the environment are worthy of consideration.”
