Daley Administration Defends Landing Fee Hikes

By Kevin Robinson in News on Feb 11, 2010 6:40PM

Responding to a letter that United and American Airlines issued to the press airing their grievances with Aviation Department heads for hiking landing fees at O'Hare by nearly 40 percent, Aviation Commissioner Rosemarie Andolino shot back Wednesday, expressing disappointment with the airlines for taking their complaints public and claiming that the city isn't trying to pre-pay debt on the O'Hare expansion. Andolino said that the fees are to pay for runways that came on-line in 2008. Andolino told the Sun-Times:

“They’ve known this since we financed the deal in 2003. ... We capitalized the interest and said, when the runways come on-line is when the airlines would pay for those runways,” “Those runways came on line in 2008. ... In 2009, they should have begun paying for ... those runways. That did not happen. ... We did not put this increase in effect last year. We had the ability to do that and didn’t. That’s why it went up even more this year — because it should have actually started and put in place last year.”

While the airlines have indicated that they're walking away from talks over continuing the expansion, Andolino says that the city has been open to deferring the debt. “We’ve been willing to negotiate deferring that debt as part of our completion phase dialogue,” she said.