Effective Jan. 1, the Prince George Airport Authority raised the Airport Improvement Fee from $20 to $25 per flight. In addition, they also raised the parking fees.
These increases would seem insignificant unless one looks at the history of airport authorities in Canada.
Prior to April 1, 2003, the federal government was responsible for the operation of the Prince George Airport. Prince George was the last of 26 Canadian airports to become an airport authority.
The concept behind creating airport authorities was to transfer the responsibility of running these airports to local authorities and thus reduce the cost to the federal government.In other words, a downloading of costs onto the flying public in the form of airport improvement fees and so on.
Authorities leased the infrastructure from the federal government (usually a 60 year lease with an option to renew for a further 20 years) and paid an annual lease charge.
Because of the small size of the Prince George Airport and the amount of revenue it generates, it pays very little in lease fees to the federal government but other airports in Canada pay a lot.
Airports in Canada have paid the federal government $4.8 billion since 1992.Vancouver airport has collected airport improvement fees of more than $1.3 billion and it pays somewhere about $50 million a year in lease payments to the feds.
On Jan. 27, 2003, Transport Minister David Collenette announced the signing of an agreement to transfer control of the P.G. Airport from the Government of Canada to the local airport authority.
In 2003, passengers flying out of Prince George paid a $5 airport improvement fee for charges of $469,070 and paid $359,474 in parking.These charges increased over the years with the AIF going from $5 to $20 in 2014.
Charges collected in 2014 were an AIF of $3,871,215 and parking tolls of $1,535,762. Both these charges are now being increased in 2016.
Total gross charges collected from 2003 to 2014 were $30,905 978 in AIF and $11,470,559 in parking for a total of $42,376,537.
It would be a fair assumption that the parking fees for the most part are paid for by the same people who pay the airport improvement fees. So this small segment of north central B.C. citizens are paying huge additional taxes to support the Prince George Airport, as opposed to having these costs pro-rated over the entire population, as they were prior to 2003.
The Prince George Airport is looking to spend some $50-60 million over the next 10 years in upgrades, and has stated that because they cannot get any assistance from the federal government, they will have to get the additional revenue from increasing airport improvement fees.
We should keep in mind that AIFs can only be used to pay for airport passenger service facilities development and related financing costs. I think it is time that we had a clarification of what exactly these fees can be used for.
The time has come for the airport authority board of directors, management, the City of Prince George and the regional district to sit down and determine just where we are headed with this airport authority concept.Having all these costs paid for by the travelling public is abhorrent, and needs to be stopped.
To give you an example. A family of four from Prince George going to Disneyland would pay a $100 AIF flying out of Prince George. They would then pay a further $80 flying out of Vancouver and then on their return trip they would pay an additional $20 Vancouver to Prince George since the Vancouver Airport AIF within B.C. is $5.So overall they would pay $200 in airport improvement fees, not to mention all the other taxes that are applied to an airline ticket.
Elsewhere, the fees are: Fort St. John $18; Kamloops $10; Kelowna $15; Nanaimo $10; Terrace $7; and Vancouver $5 (within B.C.) $20 (travel outside B.C.). Prince George has one of the highest rates in Canada to assess a $25 AIF.
So what's the point?
The point is that having the flying public pay all the costs of airport improvements, while the tourist industry, business and the federal government reap huge benefits is somewhat less than fair.
We need a better distribution of the costs to run this airport and this should be a top priority of the airport authority going forward.
