LETTER SENT TO CAPITOL HILL

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The Honorable
Newt Gingrich, Speaker, United States House of Representatives
Richard Gephardt, Minority Leader, United States House of Representatives
Trent Lott, Majority Leader, United States Senate
Thomas Daschle, Minority Leader, United States Senate
Franklin Raines, Director, Office of Management and Budget
Rodney Slater, Secretary of Transportation

Dear_________:

On behalf of the entire National Civil Aviation Review Commission (NCARC), I write to seek your firm commitment for ensuring that aviation revenues and spending are given budgetary treatment and scoring this year in budget reconciliation appropriate to the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) unique operational, safety, and airport capital development mission.

When the NCARC was created by Congress and the Administration, the Commission was mandated in no uncertain terms to provide you with recommendations meeting the following objectives: increasing productivity at the agency and reducing user costs; ensuring an equitable, efficient and flexible revenue structure; linking operational and capital investments to performance-based goals and evaluations; and making certain that FAA has the resources it needs to perform its critical safety, security, and operational activities and to continue investing in airport capital development. We are committed to meeting your mandate, but it has become clear that the current budget treatment of aviation revenues and spending, if left unchanged by budget reconciliation, will make virtually impossible any meaningful implementation of our financial reform and performance improvement recommendations.

The success of our efforts hinges, therefore, on providing aviation’s infrastructure with a dedicated, stable, and adequate source of funding. Specifically, the key ingredient is some type of stand-alone budget formulation connecting revenues, which increase with air travel growth, with the spending and investment to meet that growth. We have enclosed a proposed legislative concept to achieve that
objective. (Nothing in this letter presumes any decision regarding the status of the general fund share of funding the aviation program.)

Without providing the type of budget treatment recommended in this concept, the Commission cannot achieve the objectives of the enabling legislation. This failure will only lead to a crisis in the future of safety, delays, bottlenecks and air traffic gridlock. At that point, it will take more time and resources (measured in years and billions of dollars) to fix than if we succeed with our mandate now. We look forward to working with you on this alternative which we believe is the linchpin for ensuring the success of the Commission.

Sincerely,

Norman Y. Mineta

Chair

Enclosure