If EAS Program Is Cut, County Should Get An Out From FAA Contracts
Earlier this week, we defended spending federal dollars for the Community Development Block Grant program.
It is difficult to mount such a defense for the Essential Air Service program. President Donald Trump has proposed cutting $175 million from the program in the 2018 federal budget. The decision has been decried by U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York. While we appreciate the senator’s concern for the local airport, the president may not be far off base with his thinking on the Essential Air Service program.
It’s not as if the EAS program has sustained an airport used by hundreds of people a day; ridership in a news release from Schumer’s office this week said Jamestown’s average is 9.69 passengers a day. Lack of riders is one reason several Essential Air Service provider airlines have come and gone over the past decade. Restaurants have come and gone from the airport because there isn’t enough traffic to sustain them. County officials have tried for nearly a decade to discern the best course for the airport’s future but find their hands tied by provisions in Federal Aviation Administration grants that would force the county to pay back millions of dollars if the airport closes.
We disagreed with Trump’s reasoning on the CDBG program. We tend to agree with his thinking about the Essential Air Service program, with one change. Eliminating the Essential Air Service budget from the Jamestown airport creates a massive unfunded mandate for Chautauqua County because the county can’t lure a provider to the airport with the EAS program, yet federal contracts force the county to keep the airport open. If the president eliminates the EAS program he should give counties the ability to extract themselves from FAA contracts without costing counties millions of dollars they don’t have.
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