White House compromise on privatizing air traffic control

White House offers compromise on privatizing air traffic control
LESLIE MILLER, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
©2003 Associated Press

URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/09/23/financial2035EDT0360.DTL

The Bush administration is offering a compromise on a bill that would allow private companies to run air traffic control towers at smaller airports.

Some Democrats in Congress, however, say the compromise doesn't ensure air traffic controllers will remain government employees.

The proposal is part of a four-year, $60 billion aviation spending bill that has been stalled in Congress because of the dispute over privatizing air traffic control. Funding for the air traffic control system and other aviation projects is set to expire Sept. 30.

The White House offered to drop a section of the bill that explicitly allows the Federal Aviation Administration to expand a program that contracts with companies to run control towers, according to a Transportation Department official. Language prohibiting privatization of air traffic controllers for just four years would also be deleted, the official said.

"Aviation clearly needs the $60 billion that this bill provides, and we're working very hard to get it passed," FAA spokesman Greg Martin said Tuesday. "Industry and aviation can ill afford further delay."

The union representing 15,600 controllers says the plan is a step toward privatizing air traffic control everywhere. It sued the government in the mid-1990s, claiming the conversion of government-run control towers is illegal. The case is in federal court in Ohio.

The controllers say their jobs were protected from privatization in 2000 when President Clinton signed an executive order calling air traffic service "an inherently governmental function." Last year, President Bush amended that order by reclassifying the jobs as "commercial, but exempt from competition."

Because of that change, Congress voted to forbid air traffic control privatization. But when the House and Senate went to reconcile their two versions of the aviation spending bill, the administration added the two sections that it is now promising to drop.

Democrats appointed to the committee that worked out the differences in the bill were angry because their objections were overruled.

Two Democratic leaders on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Peter DeFazio of Oregon and James Oberstar of Minnesota, sent a letter to their colleagues Tuesday urging them to vote against the proposed compromise. They wrote that dropping the language still wouldn't prevent the FAA from contracting out air traffic control.

The change would "give the FAA the green light to privatize all or part of the air traffic control system," the letter said. "This defies the will of both the House and the Senate."

The bill now before Congress includes 69 towers rather than the 71 originally identified. The chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, removed the two control towers in his state.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the Net:
Transportation Security Administration: www.tsa.gov
Federal Aviation Administration: www.faa.gov
Transportation Department: www.dot.gov