Gary airport could learn from Flint and how it got its mojo back

FLINT, Mich. | Just four years into his job as director of Bishop International Airport, Jim Rice was wondering just how much longer he would be calling Flint home.

A former deputy director of the Springfield, Ill., airport, Rice had just overseen the building of a glittering $25 million airport terminal at Bishop when Piedmont Airlines canceled all jet service to Flint.

That left only some small airline turbo-props popping in and out of the airport.

"People were starting to call us AutoWorld II," Rice said recently, referring to a $70 million downtown Flint theme park that stayed open exactly seven months in the mid-1980s. "That's how bad it got."

The airport terminal had been made possible by a county tax initiated six years before. On that occasion, after an advertising blitz convinced voters to pass the tax, one of the two airlines serving the airport went out of business.

"That was the same year the whole air industry went in the tank," said Genesee County Treasurer Dan Kildee, interviewed in August at his downtown office. "It wasn't good."

Flint's gateway to the world

But times change and, luckily for Kildee and the blue-ribbon committee that recommended the tax, so has Bishop International.

Today, its six airlines serve a million passengers per year with 60 arrivals and departures daily. Flights go to six major national air hubs as well as Florida. Air consultant Michael Boyd has predicted Bishop International will be one of the nation's fastest-growing from 2000 to 2010.

In addition to passenger service, about 33 million pounds of cargo and freight moved through the airport last year. FedEx and DHL have cargo jets stationed there. The airport authority plans to build a $32 million shipping hub connected to a Canadian National rail yard.

Kildee, 48, who has been involved in Genesee County politics since getting elected to a local school board at age 18, is fond of using Bishop as an example of why some projects require a longer time frame than others.

"I'm not trying to say it's a panacea," Kildee said. "It's not. But it's a success."

Whose airport is Gary's airport?

Northwest Indiana officials ranging from RDA chief John Clark to former Gary Mayor Scott King have advised similar patience and persistence when it comes to Gary's own underperforming airport.

Gary taxpayers throw almost $1.5 million per year at the Gary/Chicago International Airport. The state of Indiana, via the Northwest Indiana Regional Development Authority, has stepped up to the plate with $20 million for airport improvements.

"I know the airport there says Gary on it ... but it really isn't Gary's airport, it's the region's," Boyd said when asked about the possibility of a broader tax to support the airport. "That means the benefit and burden should be on the region."

But a regional tax is no silver bullet. The Gary airport needs pluck and an angel airline or two to get where it wants to go, Boyd said.

The Gary/Chicago airport has not had regularly scheduled passenger service since Hooters Air ended its service there in January. Southeast Airlines started flying from Gary in February 2004 but ceased Gary flights nine months later.

"The challenge with Gary is getting one or two carriers there, and I mean a real carrier that connects to a worldwide hub," Boyd said.

A "Roger and Me" world

Flint and Gary share many similarities, not all of them positive. Both have struggled against decades of industrial downsizing.

In Gary's case, it was steel that did the damage, with 38,000 steel industry jobs lost in the region since the 1970s.

In Flint, it was General Motors, founded there in 1908, that whacked the employment base. Today, GM employs 16,000 people in Flint, down from the 79,000 it employed there three decades ago.

Flint and Gary often take a top-10 spot on the FBI's violent crime rankings.

On the upside, both cities are within an hour's drive or so of major metropolitan airports that are overcrowded and in need of expansion. Both Flint and Gary have airports that can profit from that fact.

With nine years of continuous growth, Bishop has done that. And Flint and Genesee County have benefitted.

Flint's downtown is undergoing what most Flint citizens see as a near-miraculous revival.

Its 1920s-era office buildings are now being restored to their art-deco magnificence at a steady clip. One entire row of Saginaw Avenue buildings is being reconstructed to house the headquarters of a prestigious engineering firm. New loft apartments in the upper floors of other buildings are sold out.

Gary's most recent success downtown is The Steel Yard, a minor league baseball ballpark with a roughly $45 million price tag. But entire blocks of buildings on nearby Broadway, Gary's main thoroughfare, remain boarded up. A dilapidated former Sheraton Hotel lodges only pigeons.

How Flint got its mojo back

Even Bishop's boosters will not say the airport alone is behind downtown's revival. But everyone gives the airport credit for being a project that restored Flint's confidence after the debacle of Six Flags' AutoWorld.

The auto-industry theme park was made famous two years after its demise when it was lampooned in Michael Moore's movie "Roger and Me."

"Whether you have one airline or two, the thing that's important to remember is it (the airport) should be the shining star of the city," said John Schmitt, director of sales and marketing for Superior Travel Service of Flint and nearby Grand Blanc. "It represents the city."

As recently as 10 years ago, his family's travel agency flew about 70 percent of its customers out of Detroit Metro Airport for cruises, vacations and business. Today, about 70 percent of its clients fly out of Bishop.

Travel agencies were big supporters of the initial move to transfer ownership of the airport from the city of Flint to a countywide authority. That move took more than a little political will as it involved having county taxpayers, for the first time, chip in for its support.

Other boosters included bankers, a prominent local insurance agent, the United Auto Workers union and the Mott Foundation, according to Kildee. An advertising campaign promoted the change with the slogan "$10 is your ticket to thousands of jobs."

The authority was formed Aug. 10, 1987, and a few months later voters authorized the tax, called a millage, by a 2-1 margin.

But it took more than year to negotiate the ticklish matter of actually transferring ownership to the new authority. It was comprised of nine members, with the city and county governments each getting four picks and the ninth pick rotating between them.

Today, no one even takes stock of which entity holds the majority, according to Kildee. And it seems that Flint has emerged from under the shadow of AutoWorld.

"Nobody needs a theme park dedicated to the auto industry," the long-time politico said. "Nobody needs a theme park to get through their daily life. But people in the 21st century need an airport."