April 16, 2008

Airport Grant Monies

Make take on story in today's paper. I am 90% sure that these monies need to be spend on capital improvements, not on debt (per Jahn's suggestion).

We need to take the money!! It will, however, increase the amount of money that we would owe if we closed the airport down. Lets be realistic that is not going to happen.

An analogoy would be this. You want to sell your house and someone is going to give you $20,000 for free to put a new roof and siding on the house. The catch is if you tear the house down you will have to pay the 20,000 back. You would take the free 20,000, put on a new roof/siding and sell the house. Note you better make sure that the new owner is liable for the 20,000 if he tears the house down.

We need to:
  1. take the monies
  2. do the improvements
  3. downgarde to a GA airport
  4. market the entire airport nationwide (not just to MassPort)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Do we know whats less costly.................close the airport and pay off the debt...........or continue at $1.5M per yr cost to taxpayers to maintain a private club for the fly boys we're all subsidizing. I s the annual interest expense less than $1.5M on the existing debt.

The way i see it, airport upgrades are only prolonging the # of yrs taxpayers have to come up with $1.5 anuually.

Now if someone told me maspport was taking over on July 1, I might sing a different song.

I was stopped today on lower Grafton St in front of the plywooded former Shaws......i couldnt help but think to myself....an out of towner rides by and sees a practically brand new building all boarded up...........just seems to send a worse meaasage than if it was a 150yr old factory building all boarded up

Bill Randell said...

Jahn:

You are right. We need to stop running the airport losing 2 million dollars per year. There is no reason why this number could be cut down by 75%.



Bill