Senate committee lambastes Transportation chief

Transportation Secretary Mary Peters bore the brunt of senators' wrath Thursday at a hearing originally called to discuss her agency's fiscal 2009 budget but quickly became a gripe session about cuts to small-town flights and the failure of the general aviation community to agree to higher user fees. The Senate Commerce Committee put Peters on the hot seat, and Commerce ranking member Ted Stevens, R-Alaska., sharply criticized the Bush administration's plans to cut the "essential air service" program in half, to $50 million from $110 million.

Stevens said there was a time when the money could be restored by Congress in a "earmarked" appropriation for specific uses, but because of the recent brouhaha over earmarks, that time is past.

"Why did you cut this budget and expect us to put the money back?" Stevens thundered. "With the current paradigm of no earmarks, we can't. You are going to have to play God and tell me which (Alaskan) villages don't get their three flights a week that means milk, sugar, everything."

The White House's fiscal 2009 budget would cut overall discretionary funding for the Transportation Department from this year's projected $69.2 billion to $63.4 billion while boosting allocations for some key FAA air traffic control programs.

"This is a bad budget for us," Stevens went on, instructing Peters to return to the White House and tell President Bush that as a Republican, Stevens had supported the president in the past but questioned his ability to do so now. "I'm not sure I'm going to support the president as I have in the past," Stevens said. Sen. John (Jay) Rockefeller, D-W.Va., charged that the general aviation industry's opposition to a $25 per flight user fee has put the entire FAA reauthorization bill in jeopardy this year. The Bush budget calls for nearly tripling -- to $688 million -- funding for the plan to modernize the air traffic control system over the next 15 years from a ground-based to a satellite-based network with greater capability for reducing airport congestion and flight delays.

To fund the $15 billion Next Generation project, the budget -- for the second year -- calls for scrapping the 7.5-percent passenger ticket tax and replacing it with a "market-based" aviation financing system of user fees. The switch is favored by the airlines, which ante up 90 percent of the contributions to the Aviation Trust Fund through the ticket tax, and opposed by owners of corporate jets, who now pay only the jet fuel tax. Rockefeller said the general aviation industry's vehement opposition to the fee "may mean no FAA bill this year because of these phone calls. I find it incredulous that owners of these aircraft, which cost millions to buy and millions to operate, don't want to pay a $25 fee."