By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
City council members have approved hiring of a professional aviation consulting services company to obtain federal grant funding for the airport and to help the city in its quest to retain or re-establish commercial air service.
Del Rio City Council members approved a resolution authorizing City Manager John Sheedy to award a contract for professional aviation consulting services to Volaire Aviation, Inc., during their Feb. 14 meeting.
After City Secretary Mari Acosta read the agenda item, Mayor Al Arreola asked if there was a motion. Councilman J.P. Sanchez made the motion to approve the resolution, and Councilwoman Ernestina “Tina” Martinez gave the second.
“Can you tell us about this, John?” Councilwoman Alexandra Falcon Calderon asked after Arreola opened the floor for questions from the council.
“We believe we’ve found a really good consultant that’s been very successful from what we understand, Volaire Aviation Consulting. I believe they’ve worked with us in the past. I’ve had several conversations with them,” Sheedy said.
“The best thing we have going for us is that as a community we’re eligible to apply for the SCASDP, the Small Community Air Service Development Program grant, and of course, you can only apply once every 10 years. Ironically, we just passed 10 years, so we’re eligible to apply again, so that’s one of the primary deliverables that we’ll have from Volaire. They will write that SCASDP grant for us, so they’re going to take care of that, and they’ll go to all the meetings,” Sheedy told the council.
He said Volaire officials would also work with the city in negotiating with American Airlines.
“We are trying to get set up for some conferences and things so we could have face-time with officials from American. This will work much better, because these folks (at Volaire) know exactly who to talk to, when to talk to them and how to phrase everything, so they’ll represent the city at some of these conferences,” Sheedy said.
“After speaking with Mr. (Michael) Mooney (of Volaire), he feels very, very positive. Again, we know the SCASDP grant that we’re going to be applying for this year, it looks like they’re going to be more substantial than they have in the past, so his words to me was that Del Rio, we were going to be the absolute golden child, simply because of our situation, with what recently happened to us, so he was very, very positive and was very encouraging that we had several options that he could work with us on, so hopefully we’ll be able to see some action pretty quickly,” Sheedy said.
The consulting services contract is expected to cost the city $52,800 “with an additional performance bonus from $5,000 to $25,000 if (commercial air service) is restored.”
The council voted unanimously to approve the resolution.
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