Mayor campaign threatens action against government
The Mayor for Plymouth (MfP) campaign says it will take the government to high court over an announcement there will no be a directly-elected mayor for the city.
The government announced on Tuesday that the creation of new elected mayor roles would be discontinued to "simplify local government and support democratic accountability for local people".
The Plymouth Knows Better (PKB) - No to a City Mayor coalition, welcomed the news, but MfP said it betrayed "democracy".
A referendum on how the city is run was confirmed before the announcement, and is still set to take place on 17 July after a petition reached more than 10,000 signatures on the issue of the £75,000-per-year role.
MfP campaign leader Angus Forbes said the government had betrayed "democracy, current legislation and the people of Plymouth".
He said: "HM Government is willing to put the suffering of tens of thousands of its citizens to the side, in pursuit of the retention of political power.
"Plymothians want change, they want better democracy, they want their voice to be heard.
"The 13,800 Plymothians who signed the petition for change did so under current legislation."
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Mr Forbes said the MfP still intended "to win" the referendum to grant its first mayor for May 2026.
He said: "If HM Government tries to stop us on the grounds of some prospective legislation, we will see them in the high court, where we will win.
"The final check and balance of a government's power is always the people, and it is this union of the people of Plymouth that will prevail against authoritarianism, fear and intimidation."
The MfP added that the referendum would take place under current law, "not prospective law that had not yet been passed".
Peter Gold, campaign manager for Plymouth Deserves Better, said it felt the government was "overruling local democracy".
"Local people, if we make a choice to vote for a mayor, the government overruling that is just basically cancelling democracy," he said.
Jemima Laing, deputy leader of Labour-led Plymouth City Council, said the leader of the MfP had been told the "direction the government was going".
She said: "It was very clear from the devolution white paper which was published at the end of last year.
"Angus Forbes can't say he wasn't told, can't say he didn't know and can't say he wasn't asked to stop.
"The reason we are spending over £400,000 on a referendum in Plymouth is because Angus Forbes wouldn't take no for an answer."
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Community resolution over council leader threat
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The FAA was forced to evacuate staff and shift oversight to another already stressed nearby air traffic control facility. 'An air traffic controller shouldn't have to worry, 'are these tiles over my head going to fall down and is it going to pour water on me while I'm around all this electrical equipment today?' ' said Nick Daniels, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Such quotidian problems only exacerbate one of the biggest challenges facing air traffic control: persistent understaffing. The FAA has about 10,800 fully certified controllers, roughly 3,800 short of its staffing target. In practice, that means about 40% of controllers are working six days a week, 10 hours a day. 'The stress is absolutely at an all-time high. 'Morale's at an all-time low,' said Daniels. There haven't been any accidents attributed to a systems failure, but beyond luck, that's largely because when there is a major problem, as recently occurred at the short-staffed center overseeing Newark airport, which has suffered brief radar and communications outages , controllers compensate by delaying and spacing out flights – to travelers' great frustration. In the worst case, like the 2023 collapse of a pilot safety notification service, the FAA can halt flights altogether. Air traffic controllers monitor airport traffic in the Nav Canada tower at Ottawa International Airport in 2016. © 2016 Bloomberg Finance LP Poole, who's credited with coining the term privatization, has stopped using 'the P word' given its negative connotations in some circles. Instead he talks about converting the FAA's air traffic control organization into a public utility, akin to power and water companies, a move that could expedite its modernization. 'Having this embedded in the federal budget, it starves the air traffic organization from the kind of capital investment that is needed.' Robert Poole Crucially, it would eliminate the financial uncertainties of an organization whose budget is controlled by lawmakers. Once converted into a corporation, funding typically comes from usage fees charged to airlines and private planes, a revenue stream that can be used to support the sale of bonds to raise money to carry out big projects quickly. The FAA, whose funding comes in annual drips and drabs, has had to stretch out modernization programs over 10-to-15-year periods it euphemistically calls 'waterfall schedules.' These baked-in delays often mean that by the time the last facility is 'updated' 15 years later, it may already be obsolete. 'It's a crazy way to do business,' said Poole. 'Having this embedded in the federal budget, it starves the air traffic organization from the kind of capital investment that is needed.' Most privatized air traffic control organizations are still owned by their government. At the extreme end of privatization, there are two for-profit, partially investor-owned companies. Great Britain's NATS includes airlines and pension funds among its shareholders, with the government holding a 49% stake; while Italy's ENAV has 49% of its shares up for trading on the Milan stock exchange. Then there's Nav Canada, which is a nonprofit governed by a board of directors appointed by airlines, private aviation, labor unions and the government. In most of these cases, operations have improved post-privatization. 'You get better value for money and you get more focus,' said Andrew Charlton, a Switzerland-based aviation consultant who formerly ran a think tank devoted to privatization of aviation services. 'And the staff get paid more over time because they're outside the government pay scales. So that makes it easier to attract talent.' That's certainly been the case for Nav Canada which in the 1990s faced a situation not unlike what the FAA faces now. Its technology was hopelessly dusty and in need of replacement and there was a significant shortage of air traffic controllers to manage a busy airspace second only to the United States. Freed from government control, CEO Crichton, a former airline executive and trade group head, moved to cut fat. He trimmed the workforce by 25% in the first three years, largely by getting rid of superfluous administrators and middle management. Crichton also ended Nav Canada's dependence on outside contractors who'd spiked development costs for new air traffic control systems. The organization had plenty of engineers and programmers on staff, but they'd largely been doing project management. Crichton put them to work developing new air traffic control systems in house calibrated for the people who would ultimately use them. 'We said from now on, if you're an engineer, you're going to do engineering. If you're a computer geek, you're going to do geeking,' Crichton told Forbes . 'And we're going to make sure the system is designed exactly for what we want and no more.' Success came quickly. In 2009, Nav Canada finished rolling out a system called XCDS, which replaced antiquated paper flight strips with touchscreen computers. The first of its kind, the organization went on to sell it to air navigation service providers in other countries, including the United Kingdom, Denmark, Australia and India. The computerized flight progress strip used by air traffic controllers is seen in the Nav Canada tower at Ottawa International Airport in 2016. © 2016 Bloomberg Finance LP Then in 2014, it began using text messages to communicate route and altitude changes to pilots on domestic flights, reducing the risk of misinterpreting crackly radio messages. The FAA only completed adopting the technology this year. As a private company, Nav Canada has made other canny moves to maximize profits and bring better service to its customers. It bought a major stake in Aireon, a company with a satellite-based airplane tracking service that monitors flights over oceans and other remote areas without radar coverage. Aerion's system has allowed Nav Canada and NATS to safely reduce spacing between planes on heavily traveled cross-Atlantic routes, letting them fly more efficient routes and reducing fuel burn. Consistent funding also allowed Nav Canada to overhaul foundational infrastructure like its buildings and communication and power systems, said Sid Koslow, Nav Canada's chief technology officer until his retirement in 2017. 'If you fall behind, you have a mountain of stuff that you have to do, and your budget gets eaten up by maintenance,' he said. The FAA has been struggling for years to replace its ancient copper-wire based telecom system. Nav Canada switched over to an internet protocol backbone in the early 2000s. Nav Canada's costs have been consistently lower than the FAA's. In 2022, its ATC operations cost $369.44 per flight hour for aircraft operating under instrument flight rules, 37% below FAA, according to a report from CANSO, an air navigation trade group. That's surprising, says Poole, given that there are significant economies of scale in air traffic control. 'As the world's largest by rights the U.S. ought to have the lowest unit costs, other things equal,' he said. 'Clearly we don't.' And Nav Canada has been able to hold down fees for its users. It raised customer service charges a steep 30% amid the pandemic as air traffic and revenue plunged. But it's still charging customers 57% less on an inflation-adjusted basis than in 1999. It's hard to compare safety across countries but by one measure – the rate of failures to maintain proper separation between planes — Nav Canada is outperforming the FAA. Nav Canada reported that its rate of loss of separation of planes under instrument flight rules was 0.53 per 100,000 movements in fiscal 2023. The FAA doesn't report those statistics, but combining numbers that it does suggests that its rate of loss of separation was 3.3 per 100,000 movements in the same year. But none of this seems to have registered with the U.S., where a broad coalition of airlines and other aviation groups has come together to support Duffy's decidedly questionable do-15-years-of-upgrades-in-3-years plan, calling for Congress to allocate at least $31 billion. And it's not clear if that's coming. Meanwhile, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), a member of the transportation committee who supported Shuster's privatization legislation, told Forbes they'll have to take a 'hard look' at Duffy's plan to 'make sure that this isn't just another government kind of boondoggle.' A bipartisan group of lawmakers is beginning to look at a range of options to improve the air traffic control system, and privatization could be among them, Perry said. 'We have a secretary and a president that are interested in making fundamental, foundational changes,' he said. 'While that circumstance exists, we ought to explore the possibility of making the improvements that, quite honestly, the American people demand, have paid for and certainly deserve.' That would mean overcoming opposition from naysayers who say the successful record of privatization in other countries doesn't necessarily apply in the U.S., which has 10 times the air traffic as includes the controllers union head Daniels. 'No one runs as much traffic that's as diverse and dynamic as what we do,' he said. Crichton begs to differ. 'It doesn't matter whether you're in Canada or you're in Ireland or in Italy or in Australia, it's the same business,' he said. 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