Airport in a Storm
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
News of a $19.3 billion bid for British airport operator BAA PLC could help inspire some relief for New York and New Jersey taxpayers groaning under some of the highest state and local tax burdens in the nation. BAA is a private company that runs London’s Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted airports, and the $19.3 billion bid by Grupo Ferrovial SA – a Spanish construction company leading a consortium that includes investors from Canada and Singapore – suggests international capital thinks there is serious money to be made in the business of running airports. The New York based investment bank Goldman Sachs is reportedly preparing a bid of its own for BAA.
New York has its own parallels to Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted – they are called Kennedy, La Guardia, and Newark Liberty airports. Rather than being run privately by a taxpaying company, they are part of the New York area’s overgrown public sector, run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, whose board is appointed by the governors of New York and New Jersey. We New Yorkers like to think we are on the vanguard of capitalism, especially compared with socialist-leaning Europe, but while the British Airport Authority is now BAA PLC, the subject of a capitalist bidding war, the Port Authority is just the plain old Port Authority, subsisting on tax-free municipal bonds.
BAA was privatized by Prime Minister Thatcher in 1987, putting New York nearly 20 years behind Britain in the effort to monetize public assets and turn them over to private-sector ownership. Post-September 11-security concerns shouldn’t prevent such an action here; American passengers safely fly on American carriers from privately run European airports all the time. It was through lax security at Boston’s version of the Port Authority, MassPort, the notorious patronage mill that runs Logan Air port, that some of the enemy slipped to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001. For any candidate for governor of New York wondering how to make a real dent in the state’s tax burden or even how to comply with that court order mandating billions of dollars in additional spending on the city’s schools, the BAA bidding war points the way to a $20 billion flying start.
