With competing agendas, Tara Field in limbo

It has needed those improvements for at least 15 years.

Owned by Clayton County but located in Henry Country, the airport is mired in a jurisdictional mess that has held it in limbo despite millions in public investment over the years.

The state and the Federal Aviation Administration have one vision for the airport. Clayton County has a different one. Clayton and Henry are fighting over the airport’s future. A developer pushing his own plan has taken Clayton to court.

The body that’s supposed to direct airport progress, meanwhile, has effectively evaporated. Required by law to meet at least once monthly, the Clayton County Airport Authority hasn’t met in more than two years.

Twice a year, a surge in speedway traffic on race days lights up the airport’s shortcomings like a rotating beacon. Tara Field’s runway is too short to be safe for the corporate jets that nevertheless land there. Its technology limits use on cloudy days. Its terminal is too small to compete with other regional airports and its perimeter security fence is only partly done.

Henry County Commission Chairwoman B.J. Mathis is blunt.

Compared to competitors, she says, Tara Field “looks like one of the poorest areas of Appalachia.”

“It’s run down. It looks bad. There’s nothing professional about it. It’s not secure.”

“Nobody stops me and asks a question if I drive right onto the property. Planes worth hundreds of thousands of dollars are out there waiting for someone to figure this out. It’s got safety issues. It’s got instrument landing issues. They call it Terror Field.”

Mathis’ slam has a purpose: Henry County wants to buy Tara Field, both because of and despite its shortcomings.

But Clayton won’t talk about a sale, despite the airport’s steady operating losses.

The involvement of others with a stake in the airport, meanwhile, only complicates matters. They include the Federal Aviation Administration and the state Department of Transportation; residents of some of Clayton County’s best neighborhoods; a handful of Henry property owners with airport access rights, and one frustrated developer who thinks his plans could revive Tara Field.

Bought to 'control the growth'

Formerly known as the Henry County Airport, Tara Field was privately owned until 1992. Using $9 million in federal funds, Clayton County bought it from developer C. Ron Thornton, later a key figure in former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell’s corruption trial.

Clayton County’s interest in the airport was defensive. It didn’t want nearby Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, a target of noise complaints from north Clayton neighborhoods, to buy the airport and create similar problems in the south. Tara Field is near a narrow panhandle of south Clayton on Henry’s western edge. Henry County wasn’t interested in the airport at the time.

The state and federal vision for Tara Field never meshed with Clayton County’s.

The state and the FAA wanted Tara, considered a reliever airport for Hartsfield, to move from the bottom tier to the middle in the state’s ranking of general aviation airports and be capable of handling 85 percent of the kinds of corporate aircraft.

That would require a longer runway.

Clayton County, meanwhile, wanted an airport that wouldn’t grow and wouldn’t attract more air traffic. The panhandle is one of the county’s best residential areas, with new estate subdivisions mixed with horse farms and older homes. The rationale for buying it in the first place was to control the growth,” said Clayton Commissioner Wole Ralph, who represents the area. “The constituents down there care very much what happens to that airport.”

Clayton could only control that by owning the airport.

Despite political resistance, talk of expanding the airport’s runway and improving its infrastructure began almost as soon as Clayton County bought it. The then-functioning airport authority tried to convince the county to provide matching funds to get federal and state money for improvements, according to authority records. Opposition came from taxpayer advocates, airfield neighbors and the county commission itself.

Former county transportation director Wayne Patterson laid it out in a 2006 authority meeting:

“For six or eight years we have been meeting and talking about a lot of things but we have not seen any action. It would not hurt my feelings one bit if the board of commissioners said, `I want that airport to stay as it is,’ because that is what we have been dealing with anyway. We work to get all the information up, go through the FAA and get grants and we get turned back every time we go to the board of Commissioners.”

Meanwhile, the NASCAR race grew, attracting corporate jets that needed a longer runway.

“Many airplanes that are coming in now are in violation of their insurance policies because of the length of our runway,” former authority board member Richard Rice said in 2006, according to authority minutes.

Some had to take off with half-full fuel tanks to make the runway work, minutes said.

Economic problems

The airport’s location in Henry County hurts Tara in a number of ways.

Clayton County, for instance, has no control over zoning on land next to the airfield.

Henry County does. It could build skyscrapers or a subdivision next to Tara and nobody could stop that. And that could hurt Clayton’s ability to get federal funding for improvements. The FAA can’t control zoning around airports, but it can refuse to support airports with incompatible land uses next door.

The airport’s location also hurts its bottom line.

Most general aviation airports lose money. “Most will tell you that the value of having the airport is not generating revenue,” said FAA manager Scott Seritt.

But at Tara, the value is going to Henry County. Clayton pays to run the airport and Henry reaps the tax benefits from the economic development it attracts.

Tara has another problem. Large tracts of neighboring Henry County land have airport access easements permanently attached to their deeds.

The easements stem from the savings and loan crisis. The airport and its surrounding land were used as loan collateral with a failed bank. Thornton ended up with the airport, which he sold to Clayton. The rest went to the old Resolution Trust Corp., charged with recouping savings and loan bailout money. The easements were meant to increase the sales value of the RTC land, because its owners could taxi planes on and off Tara Field.

These easements hinder Tara Field’s ability to support itself because they allow neighboring property owners to build hangars and siphon off a key revenue stream — fees for parking and servicing planes.

To fight back, Tara Field would have to build its own hangars or spend tax money buying the easement-holding competition. But Clayton resisted spending money on the airport.

For the most part, Clayton County didn’t mind losing money on the airport.

“There was a recognition from the start that there would be losses because of the purpose of buying the airport,” said Commissioner Ralph.

Tara Field has posted operating losses since 2004. The low point was in 2006, when an accounting mistake left it nearly $1 million in the red.

That was the year local businessman Billy Abbate stepped in.

A plan to develop airport

Abbate, 43, has a medical management business in Stockbridge, among other ventures. A pilot, he bought a 96-acre tract next to the airport in 2006 that had an RTC easement. His plan was to build hangars and upscale condos with hangars attached.

The condos would appeal to NASCAR drivers, fans and sponsors, Abbate said, but only if the airport facilities were improved.

He proposed building a state-of-the-art base of operations on Tara Field if the airport agreed to lease half of it for up to 40 years, after which the airport would own it. He offered to pay Tara plane access and fuel fees estimated at $400,000 to $1.2 million annually. He agreed to pay $1.4 million to connect the airport to Henry County’s sewer system, which would allow it to develop its own hangars, and to pay up to $200,000 annually to the airport’s operating deficits for two years.

Henry County loved the proposal and approved its zoning. Clayton’s transportation director and airport authority also endorsed it, seeing it as a way out of Tara Field’s financial jam.

Clayton commissioners, including Ralph and Chairman Eldrin Bell, approved the deal by a 4-0 vote that September. Weeks passed. Bell wouldn’t sign the deal. He said then that the deal had changed in negotiations and required a re-vote. By December, when the issue hadn’t appeared on any agenda, other commissioners called a special meeting on a day when Bell was out of town. They reapproved the Abbate agreement and authorized the vice-chairman to sign it.

The next day, the commission rescinded the agreement at the urging of Bell and Ralph. The implication at the time was that they would consider the matter again the following week.

A day before that was to happen, though, the FAA weighed in with a letter that said the county could lose FAA funding if the Abbate deal went through. The FAA objected to the residential part of Abbate’s plans, saying the land use was incompatible with airports. Although Henry County, not Clayton, approved the zoning, the FAA said Clayton’s willingness to deal with Abbate was an implicit endorsement and could imperil its federal funding.

The Clayton commission never took up Abbate’s agreement again.

Abbate fought on, flanked by Henry County and, for a time, U.S. Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.). Abbate sued the county in April and the fight has gotten personal, as documents released in the lawsuit suggest.

One e-mail between two FAA officials said Bell broached the subject during a meeting, saying “he was not interested in the developer’s proposals. The chairman is miffed about the fact that a couple of his commissioners tried to slip this whole thing through in a special called meeting when he was out of town ... And there is no love lost between he and the adjoining Henry commissioners. You may have gotten that feel.”

Bell says he opposed Abbate based on the threat of losing FAA dollars needed to improve Tara Field.

Abbate is fed up: “This is what gets me with bureaucrats. They don’t listen. They just punch the taxpayer clock and go home... When you punch the taxpayers’ clock, it doesn’t matter how inefficient you are.”

Bell, meanwhile, has no use for Abbate: “He’s done everything he could to force his will in this matter... He’s gone to Congress... He’s hell-bent and determined. . . . . I don’t like talking to him, or about him because of the way he does business.”

'Complete limbo'

Since the Abbate affair, Tara Field has been in what one airport authority member described as “complete limbo.”

The authority met just once after its 2006 endorsement of Abbate’s plan. A disagreement with Henry County, meanwhile, forced runway expansion plans back to square one.

Convinced airport improvements are hopelessly blocked, Henry County voted in April to buy it. Clayton, so far, hasn’t responded.

Bell said he hasn’t heard a dollar figure but he’s open to the idea, if the board is. “It could be a good thing.”

The commissioner representing the panhandle disagrees. “I would want to maintain control,” said Ralph.