Reading
Regional Airport has two firms looking at potential hangar sites on the
airfield – the newest of them to house corporate jets and the other a
huge firm still interested in bringing hundreds of jobs to refurbish
airliners.
Both have been looking at the site of the historic
Hangar 501, built in World War II and razed in 2008, but also at other
sites on the airfield.
And both would benefit from the state’s
move last week to eliminate the sales tax on repair and maintenance of
fixed-wing aircraft.
Airport manager Terry P. Sroka said that could bring many new jobs to the state.
The
newest developer, an unnamed utility, wants to build a hangar for three
large corporate jets at the Hangar 501 site for which the airport has a
$600,000 state grant for site improvements.
The other, announced
a year ago, is a still-unnamed major player in the airliner
maintenance, repair and overhaul industry, and is still interested in
Reading Regional.
The company was back in town a month ago,
talking to county officials about the site, said Michael A. Setley,
airport authority chairman.
He said the airport is one of several sites it’s considering.
The
airport said last year that the firm is based in the Southwest and
wants to expand by creating a major overhaul facility in the East.
It
did not said how many jobs it might bring, but aviation officials said
overhauling full-size airliners would require several hundred highly
skilled workers.
To accommodate it, airport engineers drew up a
plan for a 300-by-300-foot hangar – twice the size of the old Hangar 501
– on that site.
With the new interest, the airport is now
considering two smaller hangars there, each about 150 by 150 feet, the
first for the utility and the second site reserved for a future firm.
But that would produce about half the leasable space that the larger hangar would.
“I
look at it this way: It’s not as large as what we dreamed, but it’s
larger than what’s there now,” Setley said. “It’s a bird in the hand.”
Besides,
he and Sroka said, that site wasn’t the larger firm’s first choice
anyway, and it could build the big hangar at several other airfield
sites.
One of those is in a free-trade zone, allowing the firm to
bring in planes from Canada, work on them and ship them back without
import duties or red tape, and now, without sales tax.
Dropping
the 6 percent sales tax can add that same 6 percent to a company’s
bottom line, said airport engineer Fran Strouse of the Harrisburg-based
L.R. Kimball engineering firm.
Several years ago, the state eliminated similar taxes on helicopters, bringing numerous helicopter firms and jobs to the state.
The Aviation Council of Pennsylvania lauded the most recent move.
“The
(state’s) newly revised tax policy provides the foundation for the
creation of new, private-sector, family sustaining jobs in the
fixed-wing industry,” the council said in a statement last week.
Source: http://readingeagle.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment