The Town of Westlock made several changes to their Municipal Airport Agreement with Westlock County after council's latest meeting on Aug. 11.
The biggest changes to the agreement were the administration and maintenance positions at the airport officially being taken over by the county instead of being third-party contractor jobs. This change received some pushback from Coun. Murtaza Jamaly.
“I don't really enjoy the framing of this because typically everything we have written, it will list a title for this person and then in the definition section, it says the delegate designated whereas this agreement says administrative assistant and if that functionally changes in the county, we kind of have to redo this agreement,” said Jamaly.
“My preference would have been to see it be a little bit more of a clear label like how we do our things. We don't often name a specific role in our agreements.”
As a result of this change, the annual management fee of the airport has been changed from $15,000 to $30,000 with funds being reallocated due to previously contracted work being done in-house by county employees. This will not change the overall budget of the airport.
“I think this makes actually, a lot of sense. There's a lot of wrangling that needs to go on, just based on the history and how things used to operate out of the airport, so it’s great having that continuity and it saves time and money in management,” said Coun. Laura Morie.
Jamaly also noted this is the third time in recent years that management at the airport has flipped from county employees to third party contractors and then back to the county.
“My history on it is we switched to third party contract for all the reasons that we're moving it back to county employees so I hope it's better this time,” said Jamaly.
Other changes to the agreement include updating terms of the agreement to start on Sept. 2 with an automatic renewal after 48 months, moving the airport’s budget submission date forward from Nov. 1 to Oct. 1, removing a section of agreement which references a fuel handling system no longer in use, adding language to allow for committee alternates, removing several emergency capital expenditures and amending language to reflect the current list of properties at the airport.
“They have made significant strides. With contractor history, the airport wasn’t a big priority for the county but that has greatly shifted and they’ve done a really good job,” said Town of Westlock CAO Simone Wiley. “The committee has been fantastic and the structure is great. I'm pretty confident in the changes.”
