Issue Brief: Airport Land Use Compliance

Issue Brief

Airport Land Use Compliance

April 2000

A recent U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) report has found that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has failed to adequately monitor compliance by general aviation airports with land-use grant assurances the airports made in exchange for accepting federal grants, leading to numerous abuses. AOPA believes Congress should strengthen the FAAï¿½s compliance monitoring requirements and require more information from the agency on its compliance monitoring and enforcement activities.

Background: Grant Assurance Enforcement

The FAA administers the Airport Improvement Program, which provides grants to airports for construction, equipment purchase, and similar capital improvements. In exchange for a grant from AIP or earlier federal programs, an airport must provide a written grant assurance ï¿½ essentially a contract. The assurance ensures among other things the airport will remain open and maintained for public use and reserving use of airport land and revenues for the benefit of aviation. Similar assurances apply to land acquired through other federal programs, such as the Surplus Property Act.

By law, the FAA is responsible for overseeing and enforcing these grant assurances, as well as approving exceptions. In a recent report to Congress entitled "General Aviation Airports: Unauthorized Land Use Highlights Need for Improved Oversight and Enforcement" (GAO/RCED-99-109), the GAO found that the FAA monitored less than a quarter of the nationï¿½s general aviation airports for compliance on a regular basis. Not surprisingly, the GAO found numerous cases of inappropriate use of airport property at general aviation airports nationwide.

GAO: FAAï¿½s Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Falls Short

The GAO found that only four of these 23 field offices even bother to monitor compliance on a regular basis. These offices oversee only 426 (21 percent) of the 2,000-plus general aviation airports which are operating under grant assurances.

Of these four field offices, only three actually conducted on-site inspections, though not often. FAA staff visited airports a total of 27 times to ensure compliance in 1998. The rest of the compliance program at these four field offices depends entirely on self-certification by airports and complaints by third parties. The pitfalls of depending on self-certification and complaints are obvious. A 1994 Department of Transportation Inspector Generalï¿½s report examined one field office and found that 14 of 15 airports found to be in violation had previously certified themselves as in compliance. Third-party complaints had been filed against only two of the 15 airports.

The FAAï¿½s compliance program has led to outrageous abuses, many of which were first identified by AOPA. Among the creative use of taxpayer-purchased airport land and facilities were a dog pound, a water plant, little league baseball parks, a mobile home park, a senior center, a mosquito control unit, public-use hunting and farming areas, and a landfill. In many cases, the airport sponsors didnï¿½t even bother to charge fair-market rent for these uses, let alone obtain FAA approval for violations of the grant assurances.

The hunting and landfill uses are of special concern because of the safety threat. The hunting area contained crops planted to attract game birds, and the landfill also attracted birds. Aircraft have struck birds at both of these airports; luckily, there have been no fatalities. In other cases, survey and construction activities related to unauthorized land use have presented safety hazards.

Even when the FAA is aware of non-compliance, it often fails to act at all or acquiesces to the airport sponsor by rubber-stamping the abuse. Of 24 cases of non-compliance the GAO examined, the FAA had placed only two in non-compliance status, the first step toward assessing an administrative civil penalty or going to court to enforce the contract or even reclaim title to the land. In addition to these powers, the FAA has another strong enforcement tool available ï¿½ it can ask the Secretary of Transportation to withhold transportation funding of all types from local governments that divert revenue generated by a public airport. Yet the GAO found the FAA has never recommended that aviation, highway, or other funding be withheld for this reason. Said the report:

FAA has not used its available enforcement actions effectively to deter violations or recoup losses to the federal government. It has not withheld transportation grants, taken back the title to airport land, or taken action through the courts. When such actions are not taken, even in cases of long-standing non-compliance, the lack of action becomes a de facto policy of permissiveness.

To help combat the compliance issue Congress included in the FAA Reauthorization bill, known as AIR-21, a requirement that a detailed statement listing airports the FAA believes are not in compliance with grant assurances and timeline for corrective action be made annually.

AOPAï¿½s Recommendations

AOPA believes Congress should enact the meaningful recommendations GAO made in the report as they will go a long way toward solving the compliance oversight problem. The GAO called for the Secretary of Transportation to direct the FAA to periodically visit airports to check compliance and hold its field offices accountable for taking enforcement actions. Specifically, Congress should:

require the FAA Administrator to conduct an onsite inspection of all applicable airport sponsors and report to Congress on the findings
require the FAA Administrator to issue a revised compliance handbook directing the FAA field offices to establish regular airport monitoring primarily through on-site inspection, educate airports and airport sponsors about land-use restrictions, and specific criteria for initiating and following through on enforcement actions, and
require the FAA to add to its annual report to Congress a list of airports not in compliance and a list of airports where enforcement actions are not within FAAï¿½s own guidelines.

The GAO also recommended that FAA formalize a relationship with organized efforts such as AOPAï¿½s Airport Support Network to increase third-party scrutiny of general aviation airports. While weï¿½ve already heard that relying too heavily on third-party participation in compliance review is inadequate, we think it has a role to play, and we are willing to be part of that process.

FAA must be as vigilant over taxpayer dollars as they are in enforcing certification and safety regulations. We believe the approach taken by the Committee to the reauthorization of AIP should once again be based on the principle that compliance should be as important to the FAA as the actual dispensing of grants.