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EAAers Say NO! To User Fees
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IFR user fees are dropped from the FAA budget bill, but Senate action on the bill stalls again.
Congress extends existing FAA budget through September 2008, leaving user fees and ATC modernization projects up in the air.
Under continuing protests against aviation user fees—protests from EAA, EAA members, and the general aviation community—two sparring U.S. Senate committees reached a compromise in April that dropped a proposed $25-per-trip IFR user fee on turbine-powered aircraft from the Senate’s FAA funding bill (S.B.1300).
However, in May 2008, the Senate bill stalled again in committee over labor issues and non-aviation-related provisions.
The House passed its version of the FAA budget bill—H.R.2881—in September 2007, without any general aviation user fees. Both bills contain some hikes in aviation fuel taxes. Those tax increases are intended to fund ATC modernization. If enacted into law, the bills would fund the FAA through 2011.
H.R.2881 would also increase the charges associated with other transactions, such as aircraft registration, airman certificate issuance, and others. EAA supports H.R. 2881 despite these increases because they represent price adjustments to existing charges and not the introduction of a whole new system of ATC-related user fees.
In late June, with the FAA budget bill stalled in the Senate, Congress voted to extend the existing FAA budget through September 2008. That will keep the lights on at the agency for another three months, but it leaves a lot of long-term FAA programs and projects in limbo because no one knows what the final FAA budget bill will include. Among the items left hanging are much-needed air traffic control modernization projects.
In their present form, neither H.R.2881 nor S.B.1300 would impose any GA user fees. That is good news for general aviation, but the bills have a long way to go to become law. No one knows what compromises may come out of the process before it’s done. And the president has threatened to veto any bill that doesn’t include the administration’s proposals, including GA user fees.
It’s a “good news / bad news” situation, according to Doug Macnair, Vice President of EAA’s Washington, D.C. office. “We finally have the Senate bill the way we can live with it—no user fees—and the whole thing grinds to halt over unrelated amendments,” said Macnair. With new funding stalled in Congress, upgrades to the air traffic control system and other aviation infrastructure are also stalled. EAA continues to push for timely Senate action on the FAA funding bill.
“It’s very hard for anyone at the FAA to do anything until they have a new funding bill,” said Macnair, because they don’t know what programs or activities will be funded or cut under a new budget authorization.
The Campaign to Prevent User Fees has grown ever stronger since EAA kicked it off at AirVenture 2006. In two separate forums focused specifically on user fees, EAA President Tom Poberezny led other general aviation association top executives in very frank discussions on the impact that user fees will have on the entire general aviation industry. Pilots, mechanics and FBOs, aviation manufacturers, non-scheduled passenger and freight services, emergency response flights, business aviation, and young people trying to save for flight lessons—all of them and more would be badly hurt if the FAA established a user fee system.
EAA will continue to fight strongly against general aviation user fees, and will continue to pressure Congress to pass a sensible FAA funding bill.
