Airport tax jumps 30 percent, where your money’s going
6:45 p.m. Friday, December 7, 2007
Chances are you don’t even use Forbes Field or Billard Airport in Topeka, but a portion of your property taxes jumped nearly 30 percent to support them.
Michael Humberd, the new Metropolitan Topeka Airport Authority president, wasn’t quite sure what the extra tax money would be used for.
“It doesn’t go into a specific pot of money,” he said. “It just goes … to offset the costs of what’s happening.”
Capital improvement costs at the airports increased 879 percent for next year, from $160,811 this year to a budgeted $1,413,750 next year.
It’s expected to cost more than $5 million dollars to operate both airports next year. Taxpayers will cough up nearly $2 million of that. The airport already has more than $1 million in the bank, and most of the rest comes from rent, leases and fees.
2008 MTAA Budget
An eleven page, PDF version of the MTAA's 2008 budget is available here.
Story Background
- Taxes rise 30 percent to support Topeka airports (12-04-2007)
Comments
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Dec. 7, 2007 at 9:54 p.m. (Suggest removal)jrherrick (anonymous)
Due to a 1978 law that made the taxpayer responsible for picking up the “slack” in the airport budgets?
It’s an outrage that Topekans are forced to pay for airports they can’t use. I find it hard to believe that capital expenses for these airports went up 879 percent! If they are going up that fast the Metropolitan Airport Authority needs to think of some creative ways of coming up with the money for those cost, not the taxpayers! This is classic bureaucratic spending out of control. The MAA wants us to pay for expenses that should have been in their budget all along. Next the City council will rally to raise our property tax or sales tax to pay for infrastructure improvements that should have been in their budgets all along. All it amounts to is poor management and bad planning!
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