Another Proposed Port Authority Reform: An Airport Lockbox

The George Washington Bridge scandal has spurred many calls to reform the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, from restructuring its leadership to more public financial reporting to splitting the authority in two.

Another potential reform that is popular with advocates of upgrading the New York City region’s airports is to refocus on the Port’s core mission of transportation infrastructure.

Steve Sigmund, the executive director of the Global Gateway Alliance, raised the idea of a lockbox for airports that would protect investments in terminals, runways and other related infrastructure. The proposal, he said at a reporter and expert roundtable hosted by City & State on Wednesday, would dedicate a certain percentage of airport revenue to flow back to airport capital investment, making it immune from shifting political winds.

“The airports are the biggest revenue generators for the Port Authority, and the money gets used to fund everything else, to fund all the money losers,” Sigmund said. “Now that’s part of developing a regional transportation system, but … you need to make sure you’re investing in the airports first. And the latest 10-year Port Authority capital plan does have airports as the top priority, to the tune of about $8 billion, but it can be changed in a year.”

The panelists also debated whether the post-scandal scrutiny of the Port Authority would result in any significant changes, particularly any changes affecting JFK, LaGuardia and Newark airports. Dana Rubinstein, a senior reporter at Capital New York, noted that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has argued that shifting control away from elected officials, as some have suggested, would make the authority less accountable to voters—and that neither Christie nor Gov. Andrew Cuomo would likely give up power easily.

“I don’t know how constructive that attention has been recently,” Rubinstein said. “In his State of the State address, Andrew Cuomo said that he would exert more power over the Port Authority by reclaiming control over construction at JFK and LaGuardia, but no further details have emerged from that. It wasn’t quite clear what he meant by that.”

Apart from the Port Authority’s bi-state political issues, any substantial increase in funding for the region’s overcrowded airports is largely a question to be answered by Congress—and federal dollars are still hard to come by.

USA Today reporter Bart Jansen said that this year’s federal budget, which is still being negotiated, could set funding for NextGen satellite flight control at about $800 million a year, which is down from recent years. Another proposal to raise the fees that support infrastructure improvements to $8 per passenger, from $4.50, may be politically difficult, even though levels have been unchanged since 2000. What’s more, Jansen said that recent history has shown that there is little appetite for boosting airport funding.

“It’s more trying to protect what the FAA and other agencies get now against continued reductions,” he said. “The worst reduction you saw last year was with the furloughs of the air traffic controllers—they were trying to do something that was going to be noisy, that would get attention, that would get fixed. It did get fixed, but they robbed the airport grants program of about $250 million as a band-aid.”

In the short term, advocates may have better luck with smaller scale efforts such as providing free wi-fi, upgrading terminals or improving the limited transit access options to get to the metro region's three major airports. Thomas Wright, the executive director of the Regional Plan Association, applauded the Port Authority for putting $1.5 billion earlier this year into extending the PATH system out to Newark Airport.  

“Very few people are just trying to get to Newark Airport,” Wright said. “They’re flying in or out of Newark Airport because they want to go somewhere else, and so how they get to the airport, or how they get to Kennedy or LaGuardia is part of that experience. We tend to segment the trip and think that we’ll just deal with this one piece of it. Well, if the worst part of your trip is getting to the airport, then it makes sense to invest in improving that part of the trip.”