Tulsa's International Airport and a $7-million loan

Great Plains Airlines, which is in the middle of bankruptcy, still owes roughly $7-million on a loan from the Bank of Oklahoma. Could the city of Tulsa wind up holding the bag? <br/><br/>That's just

Tuesday, May 11th 2004, 10:06 am

By: News On 6

Great Plains Airlines, which is in the middle of bankruptcy, still owes roughly $7-million on a loan from the Bank of Oklahoma. Could the city of Tulsa wind up holding the bag?

That's just one of the details in an ongoing investigation of the Tulsa International Airport by the federal government.

News on 6 reporter Steve Berg talked with a member of a former oversight group about the airport problems. "This is an absolute mess." Ron Howell was the former head of the Mayor's Performance Team, which Mayor Bill LaFortune put together to look into the airport, after Howell says employees there started complaining about the airport's business practices. That led to a federal investigation.

What concerns Howell most in this week's report by federal inspectors is a loan that was made to Great Plains Airlines by the Bank of Oklahoma. Great Plains still owes BOK about $7-million. And TIA still has 25 acres of land at the airport that it put up as "collateral" for that loan. So if Great Plains defaults on the loan, the report says the airport could be stuck with the bill.

Howell says BOK will likely try to collect from the city, because the city and the airport are in many ways one and the same. "I would bet that BOK is in a pretty protected position as they should be. And that we one place or another are going to have to come up with millions of dollars."

But the Great Plains loan is just one part of the report. Elsewhere the feds say they found lack of competition when airport officials were granting contracts, some as big as $100,000. And also conflicts of interest, where officials allegedly steered airport business to companies where wives and girlfriends worked.

All of the problems and allegations, Howell believes, show a pattern of sloppy management and a need for someone to step in. "This whole thing needs to have much more oversight than it's had in the past."

The mayor's office says the report is just preliminary, so they're not going to comment on it yet. If the airport does have to pay off the Great Plains loan, they would reportedly have until December of 2005 to come up with the money.