Last Thursday, E. Gail Hackbart filled out forms for unemployment benefits.
“I’ve been working since I was 17 years old,” said Hackbart, 56. “For me to do something like that, it’s devastating personally.”
Hackbart isn’t another victim of the wobbly economy. She’s one of 336 Federal Aviation Administration employees in metro Atlanta who are victims of another political stalemate in Washington. They were furloughed last week amid a Congressional showdown over part of the agency’s funding. With Congress now out of session, it could be at least another month before they get back to work.
The partial FAA shutdown — initially obscured by the raging debt ceiling debate — doesn’t affect travel. Work continues on major projects such as the new international terminal at the Atlanta airport, run primarily by the city.
But it has put 4,000 FAA workers nationwide out of work, including many engineers like Hackbart who work on planning, environmental issues and grants — functions not critical to day-to-day aviation safety but necessary for future upgrades and improvements to the air travel system. Morer than 200 projects are on hold around the nation, idling an estimated 70,000 workers involved in construction or related tasks.
Air traffic controllers are still on the job, as are safety inspectors who check aircraft. About 40 airport certification inspectors — including five based in Atlanta — are working without pay and fronting their travel expenses to do annual airport inspections until the FAA can repay them.
For Hackbart, the situation is “very scary.” She’s not sure whether she’ll get back pay, and she wonders how the furlough affects her health insurance coverage. She expects the furlough will cost her as much as $5,000 if it goes another month.
A Georgia Tech graduate with a degree in civil engineering, Hackbart is a program implementation manager who works with airports along the east coast installing equipment, and she hopes to retire from the FAA. The agency told furloughed employees last week that they would be eligible for unemployment insurance.
Hackbart is restless, though.
“I barely know what to do with myself,” she said with a frustrated sigh. “This is not a normal thing for me.”
“There are projects that are sitting there in the files we’re working on, that are waiting for approval,” such as approvals for instrument landing system changes at airports in Athens and Fitzgerald, as well as in Brunswick, Maine, Hackbart said. Many of the people in the satellite FAA office in East Point where she works have been furloughed, she said. The agency has a total of about 2,500 employees in the area.
The only active construction project in Atlanta that’s been stopped is a restroom overhaul at an FAA facility.
The FAA’s suspended authority to collect ticket taxes means the agency will lose about $1 billion in revenue if there’s no resolution before Congress returns in early September.
The stalemate happened after Congress failed to pass an extension of the FAA’s authorization. The last longterm authorization expired in 2007 and has been continued through 20 short extensions since. This time the extension got embroiled in partisan battles over subsidies for air service to small airports and a recent change in rules for airline union elections.
Many Democrats in Congress have said that Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines is at the crux of the latter issue, which involves the way votes are tallied in union elections. Delta had a series of such elections after its merger with Northwest. The rule change, approved by the board that oversees airline labor issues, lowered the bar for union victory. The unions lost the elections at Delta anyway, though the results are under appeal.
Republicans have sought to undo the change, which they contend was an Obama administration gift to big labor.
On Wednesday, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood implored Congress, which recessed after the debt ceiling deal, to return to Washington and pass a reauthorization extension for the FAA.
“This is the most unfortunate situation that I have seen in a long time in Washington, as a result of one or two people who were just not willing to compromise,” LaHood said. “The blame rests with people who are so stubborn and so stuck on their agenda that they don’t care about 4,000 employees and 70,000 construction workers.”
To Congress, LaHood said: “End your vacation for a couple of days, get off the beach . . . Come back, pass a bill.”
Hackbart and her fellow furloughees are frustrated.
“I’m extremely disappointed,” she said. “How could this happen in this country? What are they doing? This is like a bad dream.”
Bob Bodron, a 49-year-old FAA civil engineer who works on design and construction of air traffic control towers, worries about the work that isn’t being done.
“The work we were doing is work that needs to be done, and it’s going to be delayed, it’s going to be more expensive,” said Bodron, a nearly 20-year FAA veteran who also works in East Point.
For him, the furlough means adjusting to a “really tight budget as far as spending goes until this is all resolved.” His 18-year-old daughter is preparing to start college, “and things that we were going to buy to help her get started, we may have to put off.”
GROUNDED
The FAA’s Atlanta office is the headquarters for the East Coast, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands for air traffic and engineering projects. Here are some projects it oversees that are halted during the partial shutdown:
Atlanta area FAA facility restroom construction: $133,900 contract
LaGuardia air traffic control tower demolition: $6.3 million contract
Gulfport, Miss., air traffic control tower construction: $11.8 million contract
Wilkes Barre, Penn., air traffic control tower construction: $14.7 million contract
San Juan, Puerto Rico, radar facility seismic upgrade: $11.5 million
Jacksonville, Fla., air route traffic control center: $8.8 million contract
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