User Fees

FAA Reauthorization Proposal — User Fees

What does it mean to General Aviation and why should you care?

Taken from an EAA position paper:

Simply put, User Fees in its current incarnation means drastically increased costs for you as a private pilot and all of General Aviation. If implemented, flying small private and business aircraft could become cost prohibitive? Many believe current costs are already too high and user fees could extinguish flying for all but the very wealthy. General aviation businesses like Air Associates and many others would find making a profit and staying in business a very difficult if not impossible proposition.

What can you do?

· Tell other pilots, aircraft owners, and aviation enthusiasts about this issue and encourage them to get better educated and actively support their concerns.

· Support EAA, AOPA, NBAA and other general aviation organizations through your continued membership and donations. We need lobbyists and spokespersons representing our concerns in Washington and the press.

· Please write a letter to your political representatives detailing what you know of this issue and how it can potentially impact your future involvement and participation in aviation. We’ll help you with the facts from within these pages. Form letters and e-mails have been determined to be less effective than personally drafted letters.

· Don’t assume that your elected representatives know about this issue. If they have heard anything about this issue, it has been from significant lobbying efforts of the Bush Administration, the Department of Transportation, the FAA, and the airlines telling their biased and distorted version of the story.

Where do I begin?

You should review the talking points in the following pages and select those items that are most important to you or that you believe make the best case for general aviation and against user fees.

Several excellent articles have been included from AOPA and EAA in case you would like to read some of the materials that have been published on the subject. The points made in these articles and documents are a good source for comments you can make in your own words.

Here are some very good articles and documents:

EAA:

http://www.eaa.org/govt/index.html

EAA Position Paper

AOPA:

The history of the User Fee Fight in the US.

http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/userfees.html

http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/la-userfees.html

http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2006/060427aaae.html

http://www.aopa.org/whatsnew/newsitems/2005/050503boyer_testimony.html

It is recommended that some of the following points be made in your own words:

The current U.S. aviation system is the largest, safest, and most efficient in the world.
Assessing user fees for air traffic denigrates safety by discouraging aircraft operators from using the services.
Collecting the current aviation excise taxes is extremely efficient with a low cost of collection and has been in place for nearly four decades, requiring very little government oversight. Collecting user fees would require a huge new accounting bureaucracy with a much higher cost to collect the fees.
Implementing user fees removes critical congressional oversight, directing, and management of FAA resources that are key to an efficient national air transportation system.
General aviation supports the current aviation system of taxes and tax collection with locally imposed taxes and charges on hangar and tie down rental, fuel, and other assessments.
The air traffic control system is a public system designed to provide services for the airlines that is far in excess of that necessary for general aviation.
The current Aviation Trust Fund generates sufficient revenue to cover existing capital improvements, even though it is now being shortchanged, and still covers the majority portion of the FAA’s annual operating budget. This is testament to the success of the Airport and Airways Trust Fund and its revenue collection process.
Over the last two years, the Trust Fund has brought in record levels of revenue. It is projected to continue to do so in the coming years, contrary to Administration, DoT, and FAA assertions that revenue is declining and that there will not be enough money to cover planned modernization initiatives
Operators of light general aviation aircraft contribute $60 million a year and corporate jets pay $210 million annually to the trust fund through fuel taxes.
Approximately 90 percent of AOPA members indicate that they will reduce their flying if the FAA proposal is enacted and the government tax on aviation fuel increases nearly fourfold.
With respect to modernization of the current system, the FAA has only provided warnings about the need for capital investments without any specifics on the system and funding required. The FAA and the aviation community should identify areas for cost savings not cost increases to modernize, by eliminating FAA services no longer needed and developing alternatives that save money and improve the quality of other services where possible.
There are no financial constraints on the FAA’s ability to modernize the air traffic and national airspace systems today. They need only develop a plan that is sound, accommodates the needs of all users, and contains appropriate cost accounting and controls, and then present it to the aviation community and the Congress.
Many communities would lose access to air transportation as a result of prohibitive high costs to fly. The U.S. has currently has approximately 5,400 public use airports and more than 17,000 landing facilities nationwide. The air carriers only serve around 500 of these airports with by far the vast majority of flights concentrated at the 28 most congested hub airports. General Aviation serves them all.
The general aviation industry as a whole would be damaged not just for personal and recreational flyers but for commercial applications, flight training, disaster relief, medical transport, agricultural aerial applications, police, fire and rescue operations, business travel, weather and traffic reporting.
A contraction of GA would also mean a contraction of the entire U.S. aerospace industry. General aviation alone accounts for an annual economic impact on the U.S. economy of more than $11 billion and employs more then 1.3 million workers
A user fee system would costs a tremendous amount of money to operate because of the infrastructure and bureaucracy necessary to track and collect the fees. This significant cost would grossly detract from any possible benefit of implementing user fees. There can be no justification for imposing a user fee system on U.S. general aviation. User fees have proven time and again to be expensive, inefficient, and damaging to general aviation in every country in which they have been tried or implemented.
Congress plays a critical role in providing budget and management oversight of the FAA and must not be cut out of this oversight role.
The FAA wants to remove Congress from its budgetary oversight and management role, so that the Agency has free reign over how it raises money and how it spends it.
As a national asset, the U.S. air transportation system does not belong to any one set of users; military, airline, or general aviation. It is a shared asset and no one should be attempting to usurp control.

We have included a sample letter below as well as the addresses of regionally elected officials in Washington. Please use these to address your letter to them:

Kansas Political Contacts
The Honorable Dennis Moore United States House of Representatives 1727 Longworth House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-1603	The Honorable Pat Roberts United States Senate 109 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510-1605

The Honorable Sam Brownback United States Senate 303 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510-1604	The Honorable Jerry Moran United States House of Representatives 2202 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-1601

The Honorable Nancy Boyda United States House of Representatives 1711 Longworth House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-1602	The Honorable Todd Tiahrt United States House of Representatives 2441 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-1604

Missouri Political Contacts
The Honorable Kit Bond United States Senate 274 Russell Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510-2503	The Honorable Claire McCaskill United States Senate 717 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510-2504

The Honorable William Lacy (Bill) Clay, Jr. United States House of Representatives 434 Cannon House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2501	The Honorable Todd Akin United States House of Representatives 117 Cannon House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2502

The Honorable Russ Carnahan United States House of Representatives 1710 Longworth House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2503	The Honorable Ike Skelton United States House of Representatives 2206 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2504

The Honorable Emanuel Cleaver, II United States House of Representatives 1641 Longworth House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2505	The Honorable Samuel B. Graves United States House of Representatives 1415 Longworth House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2506

The Honorable Roy Blunt United States House of Representatives 217 Cannon House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2507	The Honorable Jo Ann Emerson United States House of Representatives 2440 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2508

The Honorable Kenny C. Hulshof United States House of Representatives 409 Cannon House Office Building Washington, D.C. 20515-2509

I am ( description of your interest in this measure). I am writing to ask you to support me and the others in the state of Kansas whose livelihoods depend on general aviation, by opposing a new user fee proposal from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

I have several grave concerns regarding this measure, entitled the "Next Generation Air Transportation System Financing Reform Act of 2007." These are:

1. This measure would create a huge, new, multi-billion-dollar user fee bureaucracy of billing agents, collection agents, auditors, dispute arbitrators, and others. I believe FAA should be focused on safety rather than revenue collection. This measure appears to create an IRS branch at the FAA. Additionally, the measure would result in a system that places undue hardships on the small businesses and airport operators that serve general aviation and would be called upon to collect these fees.

2. User fees, like those in the FAA's plan, can be a disincentive for efficiency. Internationally, where fees are based on a per person/per hour formula, projects take twice as many people working twice as long to accomplish the task.

3. The user fee system in place in Europe imposes undue fees on general aviation pilots and impacts their decisions on safety. Rather than shoot an precision (ILS) approach into an airport which may charge up to $200 to use the approach, they are just as likely to duck below the clouds and “scud-run” at dangerously low altitudes to another airport not served by a precision approach in hopes of getting on the ground at the lowest possible monetary cost. This is exactly where the US system would be headed under a user fee system. For detailed information on this, I would direct you AOPA’s (Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association) website - http://www.aopa.org/.

4. The legislation imposes a 350-percent tax increase on general aviation over and above the fees. Most general aviation pilots and many corporate operators will significantly reduce the amount of flying they do. Not only will this impact their lives and livelihood, but it will also impact the lives and livelihood of the many families who work on airports and for businesses that support general aviation.

5. The FAA's bill would cut the Airport Improvement Program (AIP) by almost one-third, gutting $1 billion from the program and would remove the funding entitlement for the smallest GA airports. This would reduce the federal matching amount, making it even harder for cash-strapped municipalities to come up with their share of the money for airport improvements.

6. The airlines are supporting this legislation to bail themselves out. They have put themselves in a position where they cannot serve the American public. Other forms of aviation travel are emerging to take up the slack including charter, fractional ownership, private aircraft ownership, VLJ’s (very light jets) and others. This measure will dramatically impact these viable and robust initiatives.

The US air system is the safest, most efficient system in the world – let’s leave it alone. The general aviation community wants to modernize our air traffic control system by building on what works, and is in the best interests of the American public. But, this proposal is bad for the tens of thousands of small and mid-size businesses, towns and cities across the country that rely on general aviation. I urge you to oppose this bill and support a legislative proposal which does not contain user fees in any form.

Thank you for your consideration of this matter, and for your service to our state.