ESCANABA, Mich. (WZMQ) – The Delta County Airport is officially “out of crisis mode,” according to its manager. However, he says there is still a lot of work to be done.
Since taking on the role of manager in October, Robert Ranstadler has been working to resolve the Delta County Airport’s compliance issues with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Ranstadler submitted the required paperwork to the FAA earlier this month.
“I submitted approximately 600 – 700 documents,” he said. “The things I primarily spent the bulk of my time doing over the past few months were recovering records, going back and re-documenting training or maintenance events that were just not correctly documented, in some cases, I actually had to create new processes or training evolutions or retrain some of our personnel to meet annual training requirements.”
Ranstadler expects a favorable response from the FAA inspector within the next few weeks. Now, the Delta County Board of Commissioners’ hired attorney, Scott Graham, will begin his investigation into Ranstadler’s original report on the crisis given to the board in December.
“He was very accommodating in not beginning the investigation until after that compliance deadline,” Ranstadler told the Airport Advisory Board on Monday.
Since voting to have Graham investigate the situation, the Board of Commissioners has continued to debate the need for such an investigation, with Commissioner Steven Viau calling it “a duplication and a waste of money”. Ranstadler says he does not have an issue with Graham’s investigation.
“There has been a lot of talk lately about my credibility as a manager, and there’s been talks about that report being debunked or somehow being false, so I do think it would be valuable to have a third party come in and check the validity of to satisfy public interest,” said Ranstadler.
In the meantime, the airport’s Passenger Facility Charge (PFC) account remains an ongoing issue.
“We identified when I first came onboard that the account was in a non-collection status, which essentially means that we missed out on the opportunity to collect funds that we could then use to offset the cost of projects,” said Ranstadler. “Then we later discovered, after uncovering multiple minutes from previous meetings, that the account had been placed in an audit status… The company who should have been auditing the account for us and maintaining that side of it was not doing it because the PFC account was not included in the contract.”
According to Ranstadler, because the account was so far behind, the FAA decided to dig deeper. He says it was discovered that the federal government mistakenly gave the airport more money than was allocated for improvement projects in years past.
“In turn, someone—I don’t know if it was our airport consultant or if it was the airport manager or if it was the county treasurer— someone took that money and then delivered it to the contractors and consultants,” he told the Airport Advisory Board.
The Delta County Airport is now tasked with repaying that overpayment, plus interest, for a total of $37,753. Ranstadler plans to host a meeting with all parties involved in the PFC account to solve the issue, as well as to prevent future problems.
“I’m not claiming that any one particular party is at fault or that we should be pointing the finger at any one particular person,” he said. “Instead, I think everyone has an individual responsibility, and we could probably just improve the general communication between all those departments so that the PFC account is used appropriately and we don’t repeat the same mistakes in the future.”
Click here for more information on the Delta County Airport’s Passenger Facility Charge account.
