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Joe Waller, vice-president, North American Business Development for HMSHost Corp., has been elected to serve as chair of the Airports Council International – North America (ACI-NA) Associates Board of Directors for 2007. The board leads the ACI-NA’s associate members program, which includes about 400 private-sector businesses that provide a full range of services to support commercial aviation in North America. ACI-NA associate members include food and beverage concession operators such as HMSHost, but also architecture and engineering firms, airport planning companies, and vendors who supply equipment for airport operations of all kinds. Waller told Gateway International that the main challenges facing associate members right now are the same as those facing airports generally: funding and security. “In the U.S. there are fairly significant legislative issues coming up right now affecting how airports are funded,” he told GI. One is the Passenger Facility Charge (PFC), an FAA program which allows commercial airports controlled by public agencies to collect PFC fees up to $4.50 for every enplaned passenger and to use that money to fund FAA-approved projects in the areas of safety, security, capacity, noise reduction or to increase competition between air carriers. The other is the funding of the Airport Improvement Program (AIP). The AIP is another FAA initiative, which provides grants to public agencies and some private owners and entities to develop public-use airports within the National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS). Not surprisingly, Waller feels that security also looms large as a challenge facing the entire aviation sector, including the kinds of businesses represented by associate members. “Security costs, and that money has to come from somewhere,” he says. “And security has a big impact on the associates and their operations. They have to deal with it all the time. In the case of HMSHost for example, we have to get supplies through security to the air side, while complying with all the rules and regulations.” The associate members represent a lot of economic activity, Waller says. That economic strength is a sign that airports are becoming part of the economic “mainstream,” creating jobs and helping to tie airports ever more closely into the communities where they are based. And through the unique committee structure of the ACI-NA, which allows associates full participation and even enables them to take a leading role, Waller feels that associates are uniquely placed to contribute viewpoints from a wide range of airport-related activities that might not otherwise be heard. That can only enrich the debate, he feels. “There’s a huge diversity there, with a lot of varied input on any issue that comes up,” he told GI. “You can have an issue under discussion, or a course of action being decided on, and someone will say ‘if we do that it will have an effect on this other area’ and it’s something that most of the members wouldn’t even have thought of.” By the end of his term, Waller told GI, he hopes that he will have improved the appreciation by associate members of why their participation in ACI committee work is worthwhile. He also hopes to contribute to the ongoing process of educating people outside the organization – and especially legislators – about the increasingly vital economic role airports play in the economy at large and in the communities where they’re located.
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