ST. LOUIS — Members of the city Airport Commission grilled a top aide to Mayor Lyda Krewson on Wednesday about the way the city has handled the possible leasing of St. Louis Lambert International Airport to a private operator.
Three commissioners complained to Linda Martinez, deputy mayor for development, that the panel has been left out of the process of considering whether to privatize the city-owned facility.
“What is the value of this commission if we really don’t have a vote on it?†asked commissioner Jack Stelzer, a former 8th Ward Democratic committeeman.
Lee Kling, the son of the late business executive and longtime Democratic Party leader S. Lee Kling, said “we have been in the dark, forever.â€
John Gaal, a retired Carpenters Union official, said that people ask commissioners questions about privatization. "When we don’t have an answer for them, it doesn’t look transparent. It makes the process look really dirty,†he said.Â
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Kling and some other commissioners also worried that the Airport Advisory Working Group — the city committee that is considering privatization — hasn’t analyzed what would happen if a private operator went bankrupt during a long-term lease.
In such a situation, they warned, airport operations would be abruptly dumped back into the city’s lap.
“That’s one of the many risks I’m not sure the working group has adequately addressed to make the decision to go forward,†said Rik Nemanick, a business consultant.
Sean Fitzgerald, a vice president at Enterprise Holdings, said “every large company, every IT firm … they have contingency plans†to deal with “extremely unlikely but possible†scenarios.
Martinez responded by saying the working group is looking into every aspect of the privatization process and building safeguards into the proposed lease and operating standards the city would require a company to follow. A default would be extremely unlikely, she said.
She added that lenders helping finance any private operator would be keenly interested in stepping in to make sure none goes bankrupt.
Moreover, Martinez said, “if it happened, we’d have zero debt†at the airport and have the financial wherewithal to take over operations once again.
That’s because the private operator would be required to pay off Lambert’s current debt of around $600 million as part of the deal.
The commission is made up primarily of city members, but St. Louis, St. Charles and St. Clair counties also have representation. The panel is required to approve various Lambert contracts and policies.
Martinez said if privatization eventually is approved for Lambert, the mayor plans to have a “reinvented airport commission.†But Martinez didn’t provide details on what duties it would have.
She did say that the working group wants an annual review of a private Lambert operator’s stewardship by an independent engineer and a more detailed review every five years.
Asked by Stelzer how much more money the city would get per year for nonairport operations from Lambert under a privatization deal, Martinez said that’s unclear now.
“We don’t have a number,†she said. “The number is what the market is going to say to us.â€
But she noted that then-Mayor Francis Slay’s 2017 preliminary privatization application to federal authorities said the city would expect to at least see annual payments four to 10 times larger than the amount the city gets for nonairport uses — which is now about $6.7 million.
Eighteen teams of companies responded to the working group’s request for qualifications to be potential bidders. Alderman Marlene Davis, a member of both the airport commission and the working group, said one team dropped out and 11 were interviewed. The committee has said it expects early this month to decide from which to seek actual bids.
Martinez said the respondents include companies that run from five to 70 airports around the world.