Chapter 16

The last report was from the finance department, Matt always gave that one himself and he was the one to give Marcy troubles.

He began with his report on the overall county being the largest employer using the combined numbers of all county departments and had the largest fleet of vehicles. Then revenues collected to date and projections for the rest of the year.

Matt instructed the agencies to begin putting their budget requests for next year together. The agencies needed to prioritize their spending requests. The finance division was expecting funding to be tight again.

Then he broke into a tirade about the revenue losses that would have improved the county’s financial position. They did not have those revenues because of court decisions related to the Morton crop dusting airfield, the Island airfield and JBG against the county. Like the taxes from one company was going to correct all the evils in the county budget.

With Morton Field so large now the lost revenue had to be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly millions of dollars a year. Matt was advocating the county attorneys should reopen and appeal both cases.

Matt also said the finance division was looking at all counties with airports to see what kind of fees and taxes they had applied and if those fees and taxes could be implemented against JBG and Morton Field operations.

Matt continued on with a wish list to generate new funds. He wanted to double the fees for all business licenses. He wanted all rental properties in the county to be registered with an annual fee of not less than five percent of the rental revenue. This was the same rental tax scheme that LA, Chicago, New York and other cities were implementing. He wanted all businesses to pay an annual environmental waste fee and a parking lot runoff fee.

He seemed to ignore the fact that all businesses were unable to carry their waste to counties collection stations. They had to pay commercial waste contractors to pick up trash or the roll off dumpsters to state approved landfills and pay by the ton or the size of the container. I knew because our trash disposal costs were huge.

Duke and Clarence looked at me and tried to bore holes into the table with their eyes. They knew a response was coming; the other county commissioners didn’t know where to look but looked stunned.

The rest of the business owners and operators looked perplexed; this was a side of Matt they had not seen.

I guess Matt thought he had a captive audience and that I would sit there and not respond.

“Let me set the record straight for you, the lawsuit forty years ago corrected illegal actions by the county. The county ran the appeals process as far as they could. The actions by the county at Island Airport were handled in federal court; the amicable decision reached settled criminal proceedings and prevented various county officials and employees from serving time in federal prison.”

“The decision also ended JBG and the DHS suits against the county. If you want to open that rats nest back up go ahead; jail time is still an option. We are better equipped to deal with that more than ever; back then we only had one attorney, now we have dozens.”

“Next on the list is your statement about the county being the biggest employer and fleet owner; neither is true. JBG has over fourteen thousand employees in one hundred and eighty foreign countries and two hundred and sixty five locations in forty states.”

“Our embassy security division - that encompasses the one hundred and eighty US embassies in foreign countries - has seventy five hundred employees. Our college security division - that supplies college security for twenty five colleges - has twenty five hundred employees. Our auto leasing division MAAR has over one thousand five hundred employees; one of the few divisions that utilizes some part time employees.”

“Morton Field has over 750 employees - five hundred who are pilots; three hundred and sixty of those support the embassy security and the other pilots supply flight services. The rest of the employees at Morton are logistics and aviation mechanics.”

“The remainder of the employees are support, administration, trainers for the gym, maintenance, staff for the Morton and Horsey motels and trainers for the Fort Smith training complex and the gun club, the special operations team and more.”

“JBG aviation owns five hundred and fifty aircraft of which four hundred are helicopters; three hundred and seventy are leased to the State Department for embassy security and transportation of diplomats abroad and other government agencies. The rest are used for various training and security functions. We have one hundred and thirty fixed wing and drones.”

“We have planes from as small as Cessna 152 trainers, G5 executive jets, Cessna business and Lear private jets, two fifty passenger CRJ 200s a 737-200, six C130s operating under contracts and will soon have the 5th and 6th C5M heavy lift cargo planes that are back leased to the DOD and also available for commercial freight flights.”

“JBG offers passenger and freight flights out of Morton to anywhere in the world on short notice.”

“We have already made multiple commercial freight flights to Uganda, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Egypt, South America, Australia, Korea, Japan and dozens of other places too classified to discuss.”