User Fee Battle Coming To A Head?

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The available time for Congress to complete its consideration of legislation reauthorizing the FAA and its programs is starting to grow short. With its planned recess only days away and a Sept. 30 deadline looming, several issues with the House and Senate versions of FAA reauthorization remain unresolved, not least of which is the matter of user fees. As AVweb has reported, the full plate of user fees the FAA pushed earlier in the year has mostly fallen by the wayside, with only the Senate tilting at that windmill by coming up with a $25-per-turbine-flight fee. No such provision exists in the House version of FAA reauthorization. But the issue likely to be the most contentious has little to do with how the FAA and its programs are funded and everything to do with how much the agency spends on personnel. That issue is the existing contract between air traffic controllers and the agency. To no one’s great surprise, the FAA last summer decided its negotiations with the union weren’t working out and imposed its own work and pay rules. Now, the House bill would undo that move and send both sides back to the bargaining table. The White House has threatened to veto the bill over that issue.

Predictably, those who think the FAA can do no wrong and who support the user fee proposal are backing the Senate bill. The controllers, not so much. This bill is an important step toward putting fairness back into the collective bargaining process,” said Patrick Forrey, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), which represents the controllers. The ongoing spat between the FAA and its controllers, helped along by the House of Representatives, could mean the end of dedicated legislation to reauthorize the agency. For one, it’s not at all likely a separate, free-standing FAA reauthorization bill will be presented to the White House by October 1; there just isn’t much time left. That put the legislation squarely into the so-called “continuing resolution,” the end-of-session bill Congress passes to tie up the loose ends it never seems able to finish. Mainly, White House opposition to the controllers provision — if retained in the final continuing resolution sent there for enactment — could endanger FAA reauthorization and mean we all will have to go through this again next year.

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