More than two dozen Alaskans who work for the Federal Aviation Administration in Anchorage will soon have to relocate to the Seattle area or find other jobs, according to agency officials.
The jobs are both clerical and professional and do not include air traffic controllers, said spokeswoman Laura Brown in Washington, D.C.
The loss of the Anchorage jobs is the result of a nationwide realignment of a division within the agency, she said, and will have no impact on the flying public in Alaska or elsewhere.
"Absolutely not," said Brown. "This is part of a nationwide FAA effort to control costs."
An official of the labor union representing controllers, engineers and other FAA employees disagreed, saying the positions being relocated out of Alaska involve staff that supports traffic-control operations, including employees who help maintain and repair traffic-control equipment.
Larry Ihlen, president of the Alaska local of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association's architects and engineers division, said the change could have a negative impact on flight in Alaska, particularly on general-aviation operations -- the numerous small planes in the state and their pilots and support facilities.
"Let's say there's a need to establish a navigation aid in the remote Bush in Alaska. If it's not earmarked or line-itemed when it comes out of the appropriations (process), it could very well be that it might not (be installed)," he said.
The FAA is reorganizing its Air Traffic Organization, the division that handles air traffic services and equipment, said Brown. The ATO's administration is being reduced from nine regions -- Alaska being one of them -- to three service areas: eastern, central and western.
Control of Alaska operations, like those of FAA operations in the Pacific and Mountain states, will move to Renton, Wash.
Brown said the move is more administrative than operational. Engineering services, supervision of flight standards and airport maintenance and operations "will still be distributed among the (current) regional offices," Brown said.
The Air Traffic Controllers Association, which has reached a labor-contract impasse with the agency, believes the FAA has an accounting, not a financial, problem, according to Ihlen.
The realignment will cost Alaska at least 29 positions, most of them believed to be in Anchorage. Several of the positions are currently vacant, according to Joette Storm, a spokeswoman in the FAA's Anchorage office.
The agency was not able to say what was the average salary of the 29 jobs.
The employees in those jobs were first told of the move in early December, said Brown. The relocation of the positions is expected to take a year to 18 months to complete, she said.
The agency would help workers who don't want to leave Alaska find another FAA job with comparable pay or a job with the U.S. Department of Transportation, the FAA's parent agency.
According to a memo from the head of the FAA's Air Traffic Organization to the affected workers, the FAA will ease the move to Renton by, among other things, paying for transportation costs, temporary storage of household goods, real estate expenses, temporary living quarters and other costs.
An FAA team of human-resource specialists met with the workers in early April at the Anchorage Museum of History and Art to explain the process and the workers' rights, said Storm, the Anchorage spokeswoman.
A local FAA manager said the 29 positions likely would not be the last to move out of Alaska, according to Storm. Alaska has been losing FAA workers for several years, she said.
"We used to have a full-blown security staff. So when the manager was moved out three or four years ago, the (security) people now report to Seattle," Storm said.
"We have two people (in Anchorage) in charge of hazardous-materials shipping, and they report to Seattle. ... There may come a time when everybody (here) reports to somebody in another part of the country."
Ihlen, the local union official, said about 15 percent of the Alaska engineering jobs are being moved. "But we expect this to be just the beginning of the draining of the swimming pool," he said.
Brown said the security personnel were taken into the new Transportation Security Agency. She could not say whether more FAA jobs would be moved out of Alaska.
The FAA is not hiding anything and doesn't have a secret agenda regarding its operations in Alaska, said Brown. FAA officials brief Congress, the Inspector General and officials of the Department of Transportation on all of its organizational moves, she said.
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