The $28.5 million earmarked in Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr’s restructuring plan would also set aside money for a study of the airport’s role in its east-side neighborhood. The area near Conner and Gratiot and along French Road has persistently high crime and poverty.
“I look at Detroit city airport and think it is a jewel that nobody’s polished,” said Michael Boyd, an aviation consultant and president of Colorado-based Boyd Group International. “Our idea is that it could be the thing that revitalizes that entire area. The airport has huge value both as a facility and also in terms of revitalizing that whole area of Detroit.”
The money would come from the city’s anticipated bankruptcy settlement. Like other recommended investments in Orr’s plan of adjustment, including $520.3 million for blight removal, the airport investment would take place over the next several years as savings become available from settlements with creditors.
The city’s general fund has subsidized the airport in recent years because its revenues “have fallen far short of expenses,” Orr’s plan says. In 2013, the city’s general fund contributed $300,000 to fund the airport’s operations. That contribution increased to $600,000 in 2014.
The facility — officially the Coleman A. Young International Airport — may soon get some of the new partnerships it needs. Officials are talking to two unidentified start-up regional carriers about providing scheduled passenger service, airport manager Jason Watt told the Free Press on Thursday. The planes would carry perhaps 75 to 100 passengers, providing flights to destinations such as Chicago, Boston and New York.
As recently as the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of passengers a year traveled through the airport on Southwest Airlines and Pro Air. But Southwest pulled out in the ’90s, and Pro Air closed in 2000 in a dispute with federal regulators.
Since then, the facility, formerly Detroit City Airport, has operated solely as a base for corporate jets and small private planes. It remains a busy hub for those flights, with about 80,000 a year, but Watt said the airport could handle much more.
“We are still an underutilized airport. We’re nowhere near capacity, not even close,” he said in an interview at the airport.