After four years of cutting service and laying off staff, the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority heads into 2016 with a theme that had become almost foreign to the struggling travel agency — growth.
The authority passed a $23.8 million budget that includes 35 more employees and a nearly $5 million capital program designed to catch up on neglected projects the authority has been putting off for years.
It is no coincidence that the projected growth comes as the authority closes out a $26 million court-ordered debt against it for taking a developer's land in the 1990s, and while it's once-plummeting passenger traffic is up for the 14th consecutive month.
"Best we've looked in five years," said Authority Chairman Marc Troutman. "The goal was to right the ship, and I think over the past two years we've take some pretty big steps toward doing that."
The new optimism comes at the end of a turbulent stretch that included killing passenger services such as the airport shuttle and economy parking, and laying off more than 10 percent of the staff to help pay off the Lehigh County Court judgment issued in 2010.
But the final payment of that — about $7.1 million — is expected to be made in the next two months. That means the authority won't have to use its annual Federal Aviation Administration grant of roughly $2.6 million to pay debt.
Instead, it will be put it into airport projects that have been on hold while the authority staggered through its financial problems.
In all, the $23.8 million budget is a 12 percent increase over last year, and includes $5.7 million in net revenues. It will have to use that net income pay its annual debt service and loan payments of just under $4 million.
That leaves nearly $2 million of surplus that in the past was combined with the FAA grant money to help pay the court debt. Now, it can go into $4.9 million in capital improvements that will include repaving several runways and sections of the airfield, replacing equipment and rehabilitating the main terminal brickwork and roof. It also include repairing several hangars at LVIA and Queen City Airport and demolishing several dilapidated buildings at Braden Airpark.
Adding to the rosy picture is a new contract with ABX Air, a Wilmington, Ohio company that uses the world's largest fleet of Boeing 767 cargo jets to deliver packages across the nation.
Formerly known as Airborne Express, ABX started flying one plane a day into LVIA in September, but that has grown to three flights a day. It is paying the authority to do all the ground handling of the flights, prompting the authority to hire another two dozen workers to handle the cargo flights.
The authority expects to net $700,000 to $800,000 in 2016 from the deal.
And even as its financial picture improves, the number of people flying out of LVIA is rising. After dipping to a 30-year low of 614,000 passengers in 2014 traffic counts through October are up 10 percent over last year.
"Revenues are up, our number of employees is up and our passenger traffic count is up," said Authority Executive Director Charles Everett Jr. "We are in a much more stable place than we were in even last year at this time."
There is however, one fly in the ointment. For next year's finances to stay on target, the authority has to complete its sale of $9.9 million of airport property for a proposed FedEx Ground distribution facility in Allen Township. It needs that money to make its final $7.1 million court payment, but that sale has been held up for months because Willow Brook Farms has sought to enforce a deed restriction preventing the land from being used for industry.
Willow Brook Farms, which has 324 acres of golf course and horse farm directly across Willowbrook Road from the FedEx site, once owned the proposed FedEx land and attached the deed restriction to the land in 1990, when it sold it for a housing development that was never built. It's negotiating with development and airport officials to settle the matter, so the restriction can be voided and the land sale can close.
The authority was due to make its final debt payment Nov. 30, but a county judge has extended that until Jan. 8, to give it more time to negotiate.
The two sides are scheduled to meet in court-ordered negotiations Dec. 3.
That last hurdle wasn't enough to douse Troutman's budget-season spirit.
"Finally," Troutman said, "we're ready to put that whole thing behind us."
Source: http://www.mcall.com
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