WASHINGTON — Government subsidies for flights in and out of rural communities can reach up to thousands of dollars per passenger, and Congress is moving to increase the budget by almost 30 percent to keep those flights going next year.
Some of the subsidies, to places like Ely, Nev., Cape Girardeau, Mo., and Havre, Mont., are eye-popping.
Ely, in Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s state, leads the pack with a $4,500 per passenger subsidy, according to new data from the Senate Appropriations Committee. Just 414 people flew out of Ely last year. That’s 0.7 passengers per flight, which means some planes fly empty of passengers.
For Havre, each of its 359 passengers — 0.6 passengers per flight — received an almost $2,900 subsidy. Double it for a round-trip ticket.
No matter. On Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $175 million for the program, a $39 million increase from current funding. Congress initially provided $123 million in rural air subsidies this year, then added $13 million more as costs spiraled.
The committee warns it really has no idea what the true cost of the program will be this year, so it gave Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood power to shift money out of other programs to make sure the subsidies keep flowing.
Reforms promised by the Obama administration have yet to arrive, but there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency to fix the situation, either within the administration or on Capitol Hill.
The troubled Essential Air Service program is a product of deregulating the airlines during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. It was established to guarantee that small communities would continue to get commercial air services even though the routes were no longer profitable after deregulation.
