Operator calls criticism “ironic”

After years of struggling to make a go of it with a restaurant at the Santa Fe Municipal Airport, proprietor Lisa Van Allen says she is not pleased that issues have arisen over the lease and other issues with her business.

“It is ironic that I was promised for years that the airport would become the budding enterprise it is today if I just hung in there,” Van Allen wrote in a letter to the city regarding the lease of the Santa Fe Airport Grill. “Now that I may have the opportunity to mitigate some of my substantial losses on that facility … somehow the deal is more beneficial to me than the city.”

Earlier this week, Santa Fe City Councilor Patti Bushee, who is running for mayor in the March 4 election, called for an audit of the situation, which includes a federal lien of $108,078 for the restaurant’s failure to pay withholding taxes.

Under the city audit plan that the council approved in November, the airport and its concessionaires are scheduled to be audited in fiscal year 2015/16. The city underwent an external audit that it felt would cover the issue until then.

Van Allen, in an email to the Journal, said: “I do want to be clear that I have paid the IRS original taxes.” The lien remained in effect as of Thursday, however.

Bushee said it appears the restaurant operators are in violation of their lease because they haven’t kept tax payments up to date; that the restaurant may be paying rent that is below market value; and that the federal tax lien may jeopardize federal funding for the airport.

But city spokeswoman Jodi McGinnis Porter, in an email response to questions from the Journal, said that any concerns about Federal Aviation Administration funding aren’t valid.

“The city is in compliance with the (Federal Aviation Administration),” she wrote.

“The lien is a tax lien on the business and does not attach to real property or any of the premises that they lease, therefore it does not violate the lease with the city,” Porter wrote. “It also does not affect their obligations to (the) city under the lease.”

Last year, airport manager Francey Jesson discovered discrepancies in rental payments that the restaurant was making and that the quarterly payments were habitually late, according to city documents.

In July, as Jesson was going into a meeting with the city manager about the situation, Mayor David Coss told Jesson to “be nice to them,” Jesson wrote in an email.

In one of several aspects that lend a political tinge to the controversy, Coss is friends with Van Allen and local union leader Jon Hendry, listed on corporate records from the 1990s as an organizer of Duke City Gourmet, which operates as the Airport Grill.

Both Van Allen, who also as a contractor serves as the city’s liaison with the film industry, and Hendry have also been political supporters of the mayor. But Hendry said this week that he is no longer connected with the airport restaurant operation, which pays the city a percentage of sales for various kinds of food services.

Coss recently endorsed one of Bushee’s opponents, former state Democratic Party chair Javier Gonzales, for mayor. Hendry was originally chairman of a PAC formed earlier this year to support Gonzales for mayor, but later said he was leaving the PAC and would merely support Gonzales’ campaign.

‘Be nice?’

Coss did not return phone calls about his alleged “be nice to them” remark about the airport diner operators, but Porter provided this comment: “The mayor routinely instructs staff to be courteous in dealing with members of the public, contractors and partners.”

While it is true that Coss is friends with Van Allen and Hendry, the restaurant did not receive special treatment, Porter wrote.

“The airport restaurant, AKA Duke City Gourmet, has a long standing relationship with the city (since 1996) that began years ago when market profitability for a restaurant was meager due to no commercial flights,” she wrote.

“The City of Santa Fe often works with existing tenants according to the terms of their lease and believes it is better to keep an existing business open and maintain continuity of service while working with them to renegotiate terms of the lease to reflect current market conditions,” Porter added.

In an email to the Journal on Thursday, Van Allen said that what appears to be at issue is the contract’s definition of gross receipts and “an issue of non-exclusive dining room space, which also serves as an extension of the airport’s waiting room.”

“I was under the impression up until now that we were amicably negotiating to clean up any language concerning those two issues in a reworded lease agreement,” she wrote.

In her letter to the city, Van Allen noted that she offers discounted prices to airport employees and that, for many years, the facility did not offer enough passenger traffic to be profitable.

“I took a loss on every meal I served for a number of years,” she wrote. “This was with the expectation that eventually there would be more of a balance between full paying and discounted clients. … For many years, my daily gross was $200ish, while my payroll was $300.”

Craft service

To offset her losses, Van Allen has been providing food – in a role called craft service – at film sites.

“I keep my main business in motion picture rentals and craft service (not catering – there’s a big difference) as low key as possible,” Van Allen wrote. “However, I should point out that this facet of my business has subsidized the airport for as many years as I have been there for at least ($20,000) to ($30,000) per year on average.”

Here is how Wikipedia distinguishes craft service from catering in the film business: “Catering handles the regular hot sit down meals that occur every six hours and usually last between thirty minutes and an hour. Catering is brought in from an outside company hired by the production, but craft service is a crew position and craft service people are sometimes represented by the union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE).”

Hendry is the business agent for Local 480 of IATSE, according to the local’s website.

Porter, on Thursday night, couldn’t address whether city officials see any conflict between Van Allen’s job as the city’s hired film liaison and her craft service work.

Source:   http://www.abqjournal.com