Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Good afternoon everybody,
this is the November 5th, it's 3:07 P.M.,
this is the Odgensburg Bridge and Port Authority,
it's our Board Meeting. Today we have some presentations,
I also want to make note that today there is no
Border Station Meeting. So, let's proceed directly to our
Port Authority Meeting, Wade, and I'll turn it over to you.
Are there any letters of communication? Mr. Chairman, there is one
communication of note in the packet. A thank you letter,
from Odgensburg School District, regarding
the use of the trails. In addition, there's a draft report
for the Executive Summary finding on the bridge, that I'll draw your attention to. The consultant
will be here, at the
December, or January meeting, to give the formal presentation to the board.
I wanted to make sure that you saw that. And, that concludes
the regular communications. Wade can you tell us anything about the letter?
What's it about? About the trails, or what happened?
Yes. So we can understand a little bit? Certainly.
...
I know it's in here somewhere, here we go.
It's from Ogdensburg City School District, dated October 18th. On behalf of the
City School District, OFA Interscholastic Athletic Department,
Boys and Girls Cross Country Programs, and their respective coaches, I'd like to
take this opportunity to express our deepest and most heartfelt thanks in appreciation
to you, for your extremely gracious loan of the Ogdensburg Bridge and Port Authority
grounds to host our Boys and Girls Modified and Varsity
plain (?) Cross Country Meets. While the Kennedy Elementary School site,
on which the Cross Country course is located, was under construction, during the
2012-2013 Fall sports season.
Without the benevolence of this organization, and the willingness of your fine people to be so
flexible and accommodating, the inconvenience we all face
due to our home site being renovated, would have been considerably greater and much
more challenging. We are extremely fortunate that such a well respected
community organization supported the OFA Interscholastic Athletic Programs.
Most notably, the boys and girls cross country teams during this
transition period. The kindness and generosity displayed helped provide
the high standard in quality benefitting and promoting the healthy
competitive nature to our nation's future leaders. Best wishes and heartfelt
thanks. Sincerely, Anthony E. Bjork,
Athletic Director, Ogdensburg City School District.
That's really important, I appreciate you reading that, because,
we do a lot of community service work that's kind of taken for granted in a way, and it's good that you have a letter
that's appreciative of the type of things that we do. Thanks, Wade, for that.
The other thing, Mr. Chairman, note in the board packet on the left hand side, there's
list of committee assignments as posted.
Do we have an
approval of board minutes for meeting September 26, 2012?
And, October 3, 2012.
I move to approval. A motion to approve.
Mr. Barlow? Yes. Yes, I second.
Any other comments or questions?
All those in favor signify by saying aye? Aye.
We have a comments and presentations
from Cape Air. Wade, I'll let you do the introductions.
Certainly. We're very fortunate, we have about a 20 minute
presentation today. It includes the questions made by
everybody. And, Jacqueline Donahue, from our friends at Cape Air.
Folks, the floor is yours. Thank you very much Wade, I appreciate it.
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for putting Cape Air on the agenda.
It's truly a privilege to represent the 1000 employees of Cape Air, here at Ogdensburg.
Really just to touch base with where we are as a company,
we're partners in air service, but also, we've got some great news, about ridership
at the airport, and we're delighted to be able to share that with you.
It's also fun, because we're not here to ask you questions. (chuckles) This is just a
nice chance to touch base, and give you a progress update on some
really material things to talk about here. My name is Andrew Bonney, I'm Vice President
of Planning for Cape Air. Here with,
Jacqueline Donahue, I'm the Northeast Marketing Manager. Stacy, introduce yourself too?
(off camera): I'm Stacy Getty, I'm the Massena Manager, at Cape Air Massena.
Our Ogdensburg Manager, Patrick Edwards, is
in the National Guard, and was activated due to Sandy. So he's down
toward Manhattan right now, and not able to be here. So Stacy's our other
leader in this region is here to "pinch hit". I will defer to Stacy
for any operational kind of questions that may come up.
Mr. Chairman, if I, there's a part of the presentation that will be on behind, Sir. Yeah, I'll get out of your way.
...
...
So, I did want to spend a moment, just talking about Cape Air,
and where we are as a company, as your partners in air service. And then, we'll specifically talk
about the Ogdensburg numbers, and where we are right here, locally.
In 2012,
we're on pace for just north of a hundred million dollars in revenue. Which makes us
a very small airline, by U.S. standards. But, a really great fit
for small communities, because, this is what we do.
We serve 37 small airports, very similar to the Ogdensburg Airport.
That's our "bread and butter". I used to work at United Airlines.
I was in the planning department there, I sweated
747s and the triple sevens. I love working with Cape Air,
and our 9 seat airplanes. Because, I can come into a meeting like this, with people
who really know and love their community. And, we can talk about issues,
and we can solve issues together. So, I look forward to your input as this presentation goes on.
We're financially stable. Our business motto works. There's not to many
airlines that can say that. We've made money for the last 5 years.
We don't make a lot of money, but we consistently
make just a little bit of money. I think that is going to be
germane to this conversation, because what we're doing, particularly here, is working.
We have (unintelligible) we've got 70
Cessna 402s, three of which we just purchased, and will be online shortly.
That's the original Cape Air fleet. We started in
1989, as a very, very small company, with just a handful of people.
That's our original route, just between Boston, and Provincetown.
That's what our Northeast network looks like now. It's really grown.
We're now all the way
across the Northeast, we've got an operation in St. Louis, and in Florida.
Out in Micronesia. Anybody been in the Navy, or Air Force, and been out to
Guam? That's why most people go out there,
we go out there to fly airplanes. 8000 miles away, we've got
2 large turboprop airplanes out there, so we do have experience
running 2 large airplanes. 37 cities total.
70 Cessna 402s.
There are some material enhancements that we're working on in our company,
going forward. Some of which, are just on the drawing boards,
others of which we implemented, and we'll talk about those now.
We are very mindful of fleet replacement,
for the 9 passenger models. The airplanes that we're
flying, are no longer in production. So, we can't just go order more.
If we'd like to continue to grow our business. We can't do it.
Nobody's making suitable airplanes for what we're doing right now. So, we have
partnered with Tecnam, an Italian company that effectively
custom designed an airplane right to our specifications.
We're keeping communities like Odgensburg in mind, when we are
doing this design work.
We have a technical designing agreement with them now, and we look forward to
trying to seal a commercial agreement, and relatively shortly. It's also probably
worth noting, that there are no new-built airplanes
in the 15, 19, or 30 seat category, available worldwide.
Nobody's making them. So we, from time to time get asked about, okay, well when are you going to
buy bigger airplanes. We don't plan to do that, because there is no
airplane that you can buy. There are older airplanes available.
Most of which ceased production in 2002, shortly after 9 11.
So that, all those airplanes are getting older, day by day. It's becoming more
challenging fleet. Someday, someone's going to build one, and then,
we can look at it with others. Our niche anyway, is the 9 seat market. So, we're really creating
our own replacement airplane. That is a really important thing to note,
about the fleet. The smallest airplane in serial production today,
is 46 seats. It's the ATR 42. And we've got 2 of them.