The Commonwealth Ports Authority expects to collect $33.4 million from passenger facility charges starting this year until 2016.<\/p>\n
Implemented at a $4.50 rate on Jan. 1, the charge will provide CPA\u2019s 10-percent share of all the federal grants it will be getting for the next 10 years for airport improvement projects.<\/p>\n
In a report Friday, CPA comptroller George Palican said PFC revenues would also be used to pay $445,000 of the authority\u2019s annual bond payment.<\/p>\n
Palican also cited the PFC implementation as one of the major reasons Fitch Ratings removed the negative credit watch off CPA\u2019s airport bonds.<\/p>\n
\u201cFitch believes CPA\u2019s decision to collect PFCs bolsters credit quality by providing an additional revenue source for debt service and maintain compliance with the rate covenant,\u201d Fitch has said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The passenger facility charge is similar to terminal\/departure fees that are being collected in most airports abroad. It applies to both international and inter-island flights departing from any CNMI airport.<\/p>\n
Airline companies collect the fee through sold airline tickets.<\/p>\n
Also on Friday, the CPA board of directors approved a move to increase the current $47,200 budget of Ricondo & Associates, the consulting firm that helped CPA with its PFC application, by an additional $20,000.<\/p>\n
Palican said $16,500 of the additional funds would be used for the training of CPA\u2019s accounting personnel on PFC requirements. The remaining $3,500 will fund a project to update the ports authority\u2019s Airport Use Agreement to more current industry standards and to include more current language, including references to PFC requirements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Commonwealth Ports Authority expects to collect $33.4 million from passenger facility charges starting this year until 2016.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}