Ganim Doubts Stratford Can do Better Running Bridgeport's Sikorsky Airport

Mar. 23—BRIDGEPORT — Days after Stratford Mayor Laura Hoydick asked Bridgeport to consider its offer to purchase Sikorsky Memorial Airport, Mayor Joe Ganim said he is willing to hear more about the town's proposed plans.

But Ganim said he believes the pending deal to sell the city-owed, Stratford-based facility to the Connecticut Airport Authority is the best option for reviving commercial passenger service, which ended there over two decades ago.

"I'd be hard-pressed as mayor to go in a different direction with this opportunity on the table," Ganim said this week in his first public comments on what he called Hoydick's "eleventh hour" play late last week for Bridgeport's airport.

Ganim said he hoped the Hoydick administration will provide more details by the next meeting of the city's airport commission in early April. Hoydick has a seat on that body, which helps oversee Sikorsky, with the remaining members Bridgeport officials including the mayor, City Council president, city clerk and municipal finance director.

"Let's give them a couple weeks," Ganim said. "But I think at the end of the day, unless something changes dramatically, this (the CAA) is the only real opportunity. ... They are the only ones able to move this airport to the next level as a viable commercial location in Fairfield County that will rival by convenience and location Westchester (Airport in New York)."

The commission and ultimately the Bridgeport City Council would have to approve a sale. And Hoydick in an interview Tuesday said she will develop a formal offer with the Stratford Town Council, which would need to vote for a purchase, for submission at the April airport commission meeting.

She provided few details. She envisions an arrangement similar to Tweed Airport, which offers passenger service — Avelo Airlines, a new, low-cost startup, recently began flying into and out of Tweed — but is not under the Connecticut Airport Authority. The facility is instead owned by New Haven, which leases Tweed to its own airport authority, which subleases operations to Avports LLC.

"That model seems to work very well, not just in Connecticut but throughout the country," Hoydick said.

For the past few years the Ganim administration has been trying unsuccessfully to revive regular commercial passenger service at Sikorsky. Those operations ended around 2000 and Sikorsky currently caters to business, charter and private flights.

Enter the CAA,which a decade ago took over running Bradley International and a few other state-owned airports from the Connecticut Department of Transportation. Last November Gov. Ned Lamont and the authority announced the latter was in talks with Ganim's administration to either lease or buy Sikorsky to further the effort to bring back commercial flights.

And more recently the authority's board forwarded a framework for final negotiations to Bridgeport's airport commission that included paying as much as $10 million to the city for the site.

Then last Friday, Hoydick publicly announced that Stratford should instead buy Sikorsky from Bridgeport. She stated "we strongly object to a state takeover of our local, independently operated airport" and the "regional asset ... should remain under local control and not be managed by bureaucrats 70 miles away in Windsor Locks (where Bradley International is located)."

But there are plenty of questions surrounding Hoydick's intentions — some in Stratford have historically been opposed to any expansion at Sikorsky — and it is unclear what Stratford brings to the table to potentially trump the Connecticut Airport Authority.

There are lots of federal strings attached to a sale. For example, as previously reported, the CAA's $10 million offer is not based on a real estate value that Stratford could simply outbid like a competing home buyer.

Because any revenues Bridgeport has earned from Sikorsky — and it has in fact operated it at a deficit — must be reinvested in the facility, that $10 million figure is contingent on Ganim's administration proving under Federal Aviation Administration guidelines that the city over the years has spent $10 million of its operating budget to keep Sikorsky running.

"We can't profit off a sale other than paying ourselves back," Dan Roach, the Ganim aide who has been negotiating with the CAA, said Tuesday.

The state authority has also boasted about its close ties with both the FAA and passenger carriers, allowing the CAA to tap into much-needed federal, state and private dollars to improve Sikorsky's infrastructure in preparation for additional flights. In fact one new airline that has expressed serious interest in Sikorsky — Breeze — launched flights out of Bradley last spring.

Ganim argued neither Bridgeport nor Stratford can provide the kind of expertise and financial resources available to the CAA.

"I don't think Stratford anymore than Bridgeport — or Stratford and Bridgeport together — have the wherewithal to do that," he said.

Kevin Dillon, executive director of the Connecticut Airport Authority, last week in response to Stratford's wanting to buy Sikorsky said that in addition to the purchase price, it will take "tens of millions of dollars to bring that airport up to standards for air service operations."

Hoydick on Tuesday said Stratford has been in contact with potential private operators but declined to divulge which ones they have been talking to.

"Our goal would be to develop and continue to develop an enhancement that the region can enjoy and take advantage of economically," Hoydick said.

Bridgeport officials, Ganim included, insisted that, other than a conversation around five years ago after Hoydick was first elected mayor, they were not aware of her interest in Sikorsky. But she on Tuesday insisted the town has done it's "due diligence" by communicating with the FAA, CAA, Bridgeport, different operators and appraisers over the past four years before going public on Friday.

"We were hoping that this day might come where Bridgeport might not want to run the airport, or own the airport anymore, and they would consider selling it to Stratford," she said.

Hoydick also cited another motive. Stratford and Bridgeport over the years have crafted various agreements related to the airport to make safety enhancements and to limit the length of its runways. And while Bridgeport officials and Dillon have previously stated they do not need to extend the runways to accommodate commercial aircraft, Hoydick said, "All those safety and all those contractual measures that we've agreed upon, if the property is sold to anybody else other than Stratford, could very easily go away."

Her administration earlier this year made it clear it feels some strong attachment to Sikorsky after Bridgeport's airport commission, in a controversial marketing maneuver, dubbed the facility the " Bridgeport Sikorsky Memorial Airport."

"There's really no way you can change the geographic fact it's in Stratford, but (renaming Sikorsky) certainly does," Hoydick's chief of staff, Mike Downes, said at that time. "I think there's no way to escape that naming it (after Bridgeport) certainly also diminishes Stratford's role in the airport and its association."

"I just wish as we move forward with this regional airport that is so important to lower Fairfield County in general, we do things in a more collaborative, transparent, open way," Hoydick, who voted "no" on the altered name, told her airport commission colleagues.

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