Tarmac Transgressions

Strickland's penchant for flying out of Port Columbus costs taxpayers extra thousands each year

BY LYNDSEY TETER
Published: Thursday, April 8, 2010 10:33 AM EDT

Gov. Ted Strickland’s official plane spends most its days locked up at Ohio State University’s Don Scott airfield in Northwest Columbus. The plane is owned, operated and housed by the Ohio Department of Transportation, which bills Strickland’s office $400 per hour for the privilege of flying wherever he needs to go.

Take a peek at the plane’s flight records, however, and it looks like where Strickland needs to go is Port Columbus International Airport. A lot.

In the last three months, for example, the governor’s plane, a Beechcraft King Air, has made the four- or five-minute trip to Port Columbus more than two dozen times.

In actuality, most of those trips represent the Strickland administration’s penchant for sending the plane to pick him up at Port Columbus. ...

Secret enticements

Wurst left unmentioned a few tasty perks offered by Port Columbus that might make it a more desirable liftoff location than Don Scott.

Judy Wingo, customer service manager for Lane Aviation, said Strickland is a “big fan” of the flight operation’s complimentary cookies.

What’s Lane Aviation? It’s “something like a giant gas station” that planes fuel up at and take off from, Wingo explained.

“We have all kinds of cookies, and they are always kept warm,” she said.

The Don Scott airfield, on the other hand, does not offer free baked goods. Its Barnstormer restaurant does not even offer a dessert menu, and it closes at 3 p.m., according to the airfield’s website.

In addition, according to knowledgeable sources, the governor’s six-seater is a lot more comfortable for the public servants inside after it’s made the five-minute trip from Don Scott to Port Columbus.

“The worst thing was the heat,” said a former official of Strickland’s predecessor, Bob Taft. The official recalled the painful experience of crawling into the stuffy plane in the ODOT hanger at Don Scott on sweltering summer days.

“I bet Strickland has never crawled into a hot, sweaty plane,” he said.

Another former Taft official confirmed that the plane took “about five minutes” to heat up in the winter and cool down in the summer.

“It is like a large van,” said Brian Hicks, Taft’s former chief of staff, who compared the plane’s ability to heat up and cool down to that of a Ford Econoline.

Unlike Strickland, Taft flew out of Don Scott about 90 percent of the time, Hicks said, thus saving the state the cost of flying the passengerless plane to Port Columbus.

“Every time you’re putting the plane in the air and down again, you’re spending money,” Hicks said.

And it’s not like Taft was less busy than Strickland—time was tight for him as well, said Hicks, who oversaw scheduling while working with the previous administration. But Taft used those extra minutes in the car to make a phone call or fill out paperwork, Hicks said.

“(Taft) was unbelievably disciplined about using that time to work,” he said. “I never saw him nod off or take a nap.” ...

Campaign issue?

The cost of sending the governor’s six-seater to Port Columbus and back doesn’t add much to the estimated $8 billion hole in the state budget. In fact, judging from a three-month sample of flight records obtained by The Other Paper, the money spent annually on these five-minute endeavors would barely cross the $4,000 threshold. Halting the practice wouldn’t even pay for an extra butter cow at the Ohio State Fair.

But it just looks bad. And that makes the controversy that could be called “Gategate” red meat for Strickland’s Republican challenger in this fall’s gubernatorial race.

Rob Nichols, candidate John Kasich’s campaign spokesman, did not hold back when asked about the governor’s habit.

“More than 426,000 Ohioans have lost their jobs on Ted Strickland’s watch and won’t wake up tomorrow to go to work,” said Nichols. “But because he likes hitting the snooze button, he makes a small army of people fire up his plane, get it ready and then fly it from one airport to another so he won’t have to drive an extra 15 minutes to the airport.”

“Putting aside the wasted money and extra wear and tear, could the guy do something more arrogant?”

Indeed, Strickland’s insistence on flying out of Port Columbus is so offensive to Kasich that it prompted the closest thing to a concrete promise his campaign has made thus far:

“If John were to use the plane, it’s hard to imagine anything but the most extreme circumstances in which he’d do something as silly as this,” Nichols said.

In fact, Nichols hinted that a Kasich administration might not fly out of Don Scott or Port Columbus.

“Frankly, there needs to be a closer review of whether the plane’s cost can even still be justified at all.”

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