Santa Fe gears up for landing fees

Pilots will sometimes joke that any landing they can walk away from is a good one.

At the Santa Fe Regional Airport, a successful landing for all aircraft but commercial airliners is made sweeter by the fact that it's free.

New Mexico is alone among the states in banning airports that receive state grants from charging landing fees to private aircraft. That's not just an onerous rule somewhere; it's part of state law. It's an edict that may not mean a whole lot to everyone who isn't a pilot or airplane owner, but it costs all of us.

Like many cities, Santa Fe runs its airport as an enterprise fund. The city's goal is to make it self-sustaining. The airport makes a lot of money every year, but the city still needs to kick in hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep the doors open and the lights on.

The city plans to support a change to state law during the upcoming legislative session that would allow it to charge landing fees to flights flown for money and to large private planes. The airport estimates that, at the least, it could earn $150,000 a year.

Such a law passed the Legislature last year, but sat on the governor's desk until past the deadline for signing it. That's called a pocket veto, and governors who use it don't have to explain why. There's a new governor come January, though, and lawmakers plan to make another run at changing the law.

Dominic Gabello, transition director for Governor-elect Michelle Lujan Grisham, tells SFR that the new governor hasn't weighed such legislation yet.

Santa Fe Regional Airport Manager Mark Baca recently told a panel of city councilors that, especially when it comes to larger private planes, most operators won't give a landing fee a second thought. Since New Mexico is the only state with what amounts to a ban on landing fees, it's generally expected, Baca explained. Further, Santa Fe's status as a destination city for private planes—which make up better than 90 percent of the airport's operations each year—provides a safe hedge against a dramatic drop in traffic.

Baca told councilors that airports like Santa Fe have looked to other sources for income. The airport levies higher fees to planes kept overnight and grabs a few more cents of every gallon of aviation-grade fuel pumped at the airport. Pilots of smaller planes may be spared a landing fee, but they're not spared the higher cost of gas or the greater charge to keep their plane on the tarmac.

The city recently OK'd improvements to the surface of its main runway and work on a primary taxiway back to the terminal, but Baca said, "maintenance to our facilities has really fallen short."

The recession cut into landing fee income from heavy commercial traffic as flights disappeared starting in 2008, Baca said, and "we haven't ever gotten back up to the level of maintenance in our pavements that we should have."

If the city is able to charge landing fees, Baca explained, it can move toward a funding model in which the people who use the airport pay for most of its operations.

"We're able to maintain our runways more efficiently and not rely so much on grants and taxes—unneeded taxes—to become self-sufficient," Baca said.

Under last year's proposed law, cities would be allowed to charge landing fees to private planes that weigh more than 12,500 pounds. That's a sizeable aircraft, with a price tag likely running to the many hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. The city would likely charge per thousand pounds of weight, Baca said. Current landing fees for commercial traffic are $3.30 per thousand pounds.

That money is far less restricted than federal funding, which generally only pays for "airside" improvements like runways. Landing fees can be used on terminal improvements, pavement, fencing, parking, security and almost anything else at the airport that needs fixing, Baca said. Given that state and federal funding is starting to slow down, he told councilors, it makes sense to push for the change to state law. Professional associations for both airport managers and pilots lent support to last year's effort, which seems likely to gain traction again this year.

The city's governing body is scheduled to approve the committee's recommendation to support the measure at its Dec. 12 meeting.