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Old Posted Sep 24, 2019, 2:23 PM
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Austinlee Austinlee is offline
Chillin' in The Burgh
 
Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Spring Hill, Pittsburgh
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BrianTH View Post
The airport is about to pay off its remaining old debt early with cash reserves, setting up new borrowing at low rates for the planned $1 billion-plus renovation:

https://www.post-gazette.com/busines...s/201909210033

People continue to question the need to spend so much, but again this article is underscoring a critical point--the airport is now pulling in all sorts of revenues, and by federal law it has to spend that money directly on the airport. Because of the large debt overhang, that is where a lot of the money has been going in recent years, but it is now literally running out of old debt to pay.

So, it is basically being forced to do this sort of renovation project, because how the heck else could it spend all this money?

Of course as the article explains, all this has to be consistent with continuing to retain and attract new air service. So a lot of the planned renovations are airline-friendly, and in general as long as the airlines are on board, which they are continuing to make sure is true, then that's the only sort of reasonable plan possible.
I had a conversation with my dad about this when the airport renovation plans were announced last year. He said something along the lines of "Oh man they are just paying it off and going right back into debt?" and I said "Dad, this isn't a house where you pay it off and then never do any updates to it for 40 years like a grandmas house. It has to be modernized every so often to remain competitive and relevant and to keep up with modern technology trends (such as eliminating the large ticketing area since most people book online now)."
But yeah, the federal money has to be used as well.
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