Greene Co. airport improvements could land jobs for region

The Beavercreek Twp. Board of Trustees is considering financial incentives for potential development of more than 1,000 acres near the Greene County Lewis A. Jackson Regional Airport.
The board plans to vote March 5 on a resolution to establish a tax increment financing fund (TIF) for a 19-parcel, 1,086-acre area south of U.S. 35 that could become an economic engine by serving corporate jets and new businesses. It would enable developers not to shoulder all the cost of roads, water, sewer and other infrastructure.
The mostly agricultural area stretches from Langs Chevrolet near Orchard Lane to south of the airport. The biggest parcel is a 615-acre spot owned by the Valley Springs Farm Co.
Letters of notice have been sent to the superintendents of Beavercreek, Xenia and the Greene County Career Center school districts about the proposed 10-year TIF.
“It can impact them from the standpoint that they lose revenue off of this,” Beavercreek Twp. Trustee Robert Glaser said. “But we have the option to take and make it up. We can take money out of that pool and make them whole. This puts them on notice that it’s going to happen, or it could happen.”
‘Nobody’ knows 
about TIF plan
Glaser admits most public officials and residents know little of the plan. “We’ve really had no public input on this whatsoever,” Glaser said during a trustee meeting on Feb. 6. “I don’t think the public is aware that we are doing this.
“Nobody seems to know about this. We publish these reports but who reads all this stuff? I think we need to go a little extra step and make sure that the public is aware of what we’re doing, so that there’s no surprises.”
Greene County Auditor David Graham said a TIF was used to develop the land that became The Greene.
“The developer wanted somebody to pay for the infrastructure improvements that needed to be made related to that property. There were no roads, no water, no sewer,” Graham said. “Nobody likes the theory of a TIF, but it gives you an opportunity to control a development.”
A 2008 Beavercreek citizen satisfaction survey performed by Fallon Research showed 52 percent of the city’s residents favored using a TIF-like tool and 37 percent opposed it.
Airport could be economic boon
The area near the airport has long been considered a potential economic resource. With Wright-Patterson Air Force Base positioning itself for more rounds of Base Realignment and Closure, the site could be attractive to defense contractors and others.
Glaser said the runway’s expansion to 5,000 feet is nearly completed, which will enable it to accommodate more private jets per Federal Aviation Administration rules. Glaser said the airport may need a waiver since the setback from the taxiways and some hangars do not meet the FAA regulations.
In 2008, the collection of hangars and runways was in the sights of Beavercreek and Xenia city officials when both proposed joint tax agreements with the township in order to bring services to the property. Officials from both cities hoped to have their foot in the door when the property near the airport begins to develop.
“Our county airport is strategically located. It’s a real jewel,” Greene County Commissioner Rick Perales said in July 2008 after an airport plan was presented. “This gives us a foundation to work from.”
Xenia City Manager Jim Percival said he proposed a Joint Economic Development District that included the TIF idea during a July 2008 board of trustees meeting, but that he “never heard back.”
Percival said Xenia has no plans to annex any land near the airport. He did not know about the township’s newest plan. “There’s potential with the airport, no question,” he said. “We always want to work with our neighbors to provide benefits to the entire region.”
Trustees tried to acquire farm land
Glaser said the trustees tried to purchase a 60-acre parcel just south of the airport from the Beavercreek-based Deccan Group, LLC.
“We were just looking at it as a potential investment, let’s put it that way,” Glaser said of the farm land that includes a 1900 bungalow and another structure. “This was a strategic piece of property for the future of the township . . . Control of the property was important to us on a long-term basis. . . . We couldn’t reach terms with the owner.”
County auditor records show the land was purchased for $300,000 in 2003. Neither side disclosed the negotiated prices or how far apart the sides were.
Jan Venkayya, president of Deccan, said the house is rented out and the land leased to a farmer who grows soybeans and corn. She said the township’s offer was not the right price.
“For development, anyone wants to have utilities,” Venkayya said. “I think (our land) would be very useful for the airport for them to expand. It’s an emotional issue for me. I have an attachment to that land, but maybe at some point I would be willing to sell it.”

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UC Funding Provides $16.8 Million of Capital for Chicago Portfolio

BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)– UC Funding recently closed a $16.8 million investment on a portfolio of properties located in Chicago, IL and Tennessee. The transaction was underwritten and closed in under 30 days. The Investment is secured by a variety of different collateral structures including first mortgages, mezzanine positions, and equity. UC Funding’s capital solution assisted the borrower in refinancing and acquired ten properties; nine of which are multifamily assets, located in urban and suburban Chicago with 647 units. The tenth asset is a 245-key hotel located in Memphis, TN, in close proximity to the Memphis International Airport and Graceland, requires significant capital work. The sponsor has a proven track of acquiring and renovating well-located properties with significant upside potential. UC’s loan provides the sponsor with funds to continue its successful program on this new group of assets.
Dan Palmier, CEO of UC said, “This deal represents a majority of what UC does; helping great operators create unique financial solutions to fit the most complicated deals and fund them quickly.”
UC Funding LLC (www.ucfunds.com) is a national, diversified, real estate finance company, founded in 2010 and headquartered in Boston, with offices in New York and Miami. UC Funding provides commercial real estate financing solutions throughout the United States. Nearing 1 Billion in capital and a growing staff of 50 team members, UC Funding serves as one of the nation’s fastest growing real estate financing institutions. UC Funding was nominated company of the month during 2011 by both the New York Real Estate Journal and New England Real Estate Journal. UC Funding’s core belief is that real estate ownership and real estate financing should work together as a partnership. By working together, UC Funding shares each and every client’s vision of creating innovative financial solutions.
UC Funding provides financial solutions throughout the entire capital stack, including joint venture equity. UC Funding is one of the nation’s most entrepreneurial lending institutions focused on Multi Family, Retail, Office, Hotel and Industrial/Warehouse assets nationwide. For more about the UC Funding’s commercial real estate platform, visit (http://www.ucfunds.com/).

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Financing a hurdle for airport hotel

By John Nolan, Staff Writer 7:27 PM Sunday, December 4, 2011
DAYTON — Dayton International Airport officials face a stiff challenge in their latest attempt to find a developer that can obtain financing to build a hotel at the airport, commercial real estate executives said.
“The economy has slightly improved for hotel financing, but I still think it’s going to be very difficult,” said Terry Baltes, president of Baltes Commercial Realty in Washington Twp.
The Dayton airport’s first try lagged for more than a year and fizzled in October when three banks that were evaluating the project decided not to loan the money to a Cincinnati-area developer. The airport has asked for a new round of proposals that developers must submit by 4 p.m. Dec. 30.
Terrence G. Slaybaugh, Dayton’s director of aviation, wants a developer to build on the two-acre site that was cleared when the city demolished the 40-year-old Dayton Airport Hotel this year. It would be convenient to PSA Airlines Inc.’s corporate headquarters and its crew training facility at the airport, he said.
Slaybaugh said he has received calls expressing interest from several developers, whom he declined to identify.
“I am optimistic that we’ll be able to put something together,” he said.
Half a dozen representatives of developers or construction subcontractors showed up this week for a non-mandatory meeting to discuss the project with airport officials.
Construction loans are hard to come by, and hotel construction financing is even tougher because businesses and leisure travelers tend to cut back on travel in lean times, commercial real estate brokers said. It is critical that the city-owned airport attract a developer who can inspire confidence in potential lenders, brokers said.
“I think that has more to do with the quality of the developer, than the timing in the financial market,” said Mark Fornes, a partner in Mark Fornes Realty Inc. “The key to getting that deal done is finding a good, reputable hotel developer with the track record necessary to do the development.”
“The stars must align for the right developer, right brand, right sponsor, feasibility and financing availability,” said Eric Belfrage, vice president of CBRE Group Inc.’s hotels and investment properties unit in Columbus.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2242 or jnolan@DaytonDailyNews.com.

George Osborne’s airport hint has Thames estuary in a spin

Dan Milmo and
Patrick Collinson

The Thames hub as envisaged by Norman Foster’s design company. Photograph: Foster & Partners/PA

There is a geometric beauty to the view from Kent’s Isle of Grain, as alignments of mudflat, estuary and sky dominate a horizon that, in the wake of this week’s autumn statement, could soon be scarred by dozens of airliners in the cause of economic prosperity.
George Osborne dropped the clearest hint yet that the government is warming to the notion of an airport on the Thames estuary, possibly built on this peninsula, as he pledged to “explore all options for maintaining the UK’s aviation hub status”. For residents of Grain village, it was confirmation that kickstarting the British economy poses a threat to their homes. “It’s ridiculous,” says Jackie Jones, a housewife and Grain resident of 21 years, walking her two dogs on the shoreline. “The economy has gone downhill so much that something has to happen. But I am not sure that pouring billions of pounds into this is the way forward.”
The chancellor begs to differ. He is sold on the idea that infrastructure investment can boost the UK by providing economic links for business and unlocking cash from British pension funds. He also unveiled a memorandum of understanding with the National Association of Pension Funds and the Pension Protection Fund to invest up to £20bn in projects such as power stations and high-speed rail lines, as well as the four-runway airport that would be built right over a quiet village in north Kent. A national infrastructure plan published this week mentioned 500 projects. All they need now is the money.
The Thames airport, unthinkable even a year ago, is becoming ever more feasible. Boris Johnson has campaigned for a new London hub airport in the face of increasingly weak opposition from the Conservative party. Tuesday saw the government come close to conceding that London’s mayor has given them a get-out from opposing new runways at Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted.
Johnson’s main lobbyist on a new airport is Daniel Moylan, deputy chairman of Transport for London, which runs the capital’s tubes and buses. He says: “I welcome the fact that the chancellor has said Britain must have a modern hub airport, and confirmed that there will be no expansion at Heathrow. This gives impetus to the search for a new location and the mayor is keen that it should be to the east of London. An urgent debate needs to take place.” Johnson has pushed his own idea of a floating airport – dubbed “Boris Island” – situated opposite Grain and off the Isle of Sheppey.
The renowned architect Lord Foster made an arresting contribution last month with proposals for a £50bn hub on Grain, in a project drawn up by his Foster & Partners, economics consultancy Volterra and planning specialist Halcrow. As well as an airport carrying 150 million passengers a year, it includes a new Thames flood barrier and a high-speed rail line that will connect to the High Speed One and High Speed Two routes. The plans are suitably futuristic but £50bn is a towering bill, dwarfing even the £32bn needed to build the HS2 route from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. For all the infrastructure headlines in the wake of Osborne’s statement, it was only a sketch of complex planning and funding needs.
There is, however, optimism about funding. Ben Hamer, an executive director at Halcrow, says initial discussions about the project have already taken place with sovereign wealth funds – the investment arms of rich states – and major banks. The issue for Halcrow is getting cross-party political backing. That, in turn, will help secure the seed funding to get the project up and running, followed by the multibillion-pound investment in constructing the site.
“If the government says it would love a Thames hub airport that would be a very strong market signal to investors that the risk of getting this through planning are going to be acceptable,” Hamer says, adding that there has been strong interest from Asia in the project. “They are looking for flagship projects.”
He also says that general interest from the financial sector appeared to be strong, and will be further bolstered by the chancellor’s announcement of a pension-fund-backed infrastructure programme. “We are having discussions with finance houses and we have invested a lot of our own time and energy on preparing the ground for funding.”
One scenario could involve the government taking the financial risk out of building the airport by paying a construction firm an agreed sum, plus costs, to put it together. Underwritten by the state, this would keep the cost of capital low. The asset would be handed over to the state on completion and sold to UK pension funds on a 30-year-lease – rather like High Speed One, the lease for which has been sold for £1.4bn to a Canadian grouping of the investment firm Borealis Infrastructure and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan fund. The new airport owner would pay off its multibillion-pound investment by pocketing the revenues over the ensuing three decades.
The issue with this plan is the involvement of the government at the beginning. In the absence of public money – a fair assumption under current spending constraints – construction of a Thames hub would rely on loans raised from the banking sector. But with beleaguered banks determined to shrink their balance sheets – and warned this week by Bank of England governor Mervyn King to put aside even more capital – the proposal could remain stuck in the mud.
One possible solution lies in the national infrastructure plan. Osborne pledged just £5bn in new government cash for infrastructure projects but indicated that UK pension funds were ripe with untapped financial potential.
“We need to put to work the many billions of pounds that British people save in British pension funds, and get those savings invested in British projects. You could call it British savings for British jobs,” he said in the autumn statement, adding that the government was exploring guarantees and ways of letting city mayors borrow against future tax receipts in an echo of the vast municipally funded works that built Britain’s water, sewerage and road network in the Victorian era, as well as hospitals and schools.
Pension funds, which face the challenge of paying out fixed incomes to retirees when investment returns are at historic lows, like the concept of projects with reliable long-term income streams, such as toll roads and bridges. Airport landing fees and rentals from retail premises and parking could form an attractive income. Last week saw the creation of the Insurers’ Infrastructure Investment Forum, a joint initiative between the Association of British Insurers and the government, whose first task will be to create A-grade “infrastructure bonds” that will be attractive to pension funds.
But relying on pension funds for financing airport construction is still a remote prospect. Richard Abadie, infrastructure partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a one-time Treasury official overseeing public-private partnerships, says: “You have to ask: why isn’t pension fund investment in infrastructure happening already? They don’t believe the returns are high enough, and they don’t want to take construction risk. It’s banks that traditionally take on project finance risk and only after that will pension funds and insurers invest in the long-term cash flow to match their liability profiles. But the banks are under huge pressure to reduce their balance sheets.” He cited RBS’s recent decision to sell £5bn of its project finance loans to Mitsubishi, and new ‘Basel III’ bank capital requirements that will further constrain lending.
An alternative is for Britain to create a state infrastructure bank to channel loans into major projects. It could be structured along the lines of the European Investment Bank or state banks that are behind huge construction projects in Brazil, India, Mexico and some US states.
Until then, Lord Foster’s island airport may remain on the drawing board. Decades ago, the original estuary airport project was opposite Grain, on the north bank of the Thames at Maplin Sands. It was conceived in the boom years of the early 1970s, and in 1973 an act paving the way for construction was passed in parliament. But the project was one of the earliest casualties of the 1973-4 oil crisis and subsequent recession. As a new credit crunch beckons, proponents of the scheme will be hoping that history does not repeat itself – although the residents of Grain will not agree.

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Air Travel Predictions for 2012

The burning air travel questions of the coming year: Will fees rise? Will our tickets cost more? Will Alec Baldwin disrupt our flight?
And what about finding true love or lust on a plane? See number four. Now, normally, my prognostication skills don’t extend to all areas of modern life – for instance, I did not see the Kardashian divorce coming – but I do know air travel and have examined trends and data over the past several years so I have some answers. Now let’s get started.
For more travel news and insights view Rick’s blog at farecompare.com
Here are the top five air travel predictions of 2012.

Folks holding tickets for American Airlines, not to mention those holding thousands of frequent flyer miles, got a scare back in November when the airline abruptly announced its bankruptcy. A scare is all it was, though.
In fact, bankruptcy is a well-worn path for large U.S. carriers. As Southwest CEO Gary Kelly recently noted, many legacy airlines effectively emerged from bankruptcy in great shape as “giant, lower-cost airlines [that are] much more formidable competition than their predecessors.”
American has 18 months to emerge from Chapter 11 and by all accounts it probably should merge with another airline. Yet most of the musical chairs are already accounted for – think Delta/Northwest, United/Continental – so there are not many choices. US Airways might be a willing partner for AA but culture clash could spell doom. I’m on the fence on this one.

A recent online survey by travel website Travel Ticker confirmed what I’ve seen from my vast storehouse of data: An increasing number of people say they’ll do more leisure traveling in the coming year, and even more say they’ll fly if they can find good deals in 2012 (note: we’ve been seeing an awful lot of airfare sales in the past couple of weeks).
Empty middle seats are so last decade. Today the airlines are all about “contract, merge, and survive” as opposed to the old model of “expand at any cost.” Sure, we can dream of the good old days when an arm rest didn’t have a body leaning on it, but that’s all it is, a dream.

You may be excused for thinking flying is only for the rich. After all, the airlines attempted to raise prices 22 times in 2011 (and nine of those attempts were successful). However, there is a bronze lining in that the airlines still have to fill those middle seats, so they will keep tossing out occasional discounts though they may be fewer and farther between.
If you shop smart – if you buy your tickets on Tuesday and are willing to flying midweek instead of Friday or Sunday – you can still game the airfare pricing system and come out a winner. At least, most of the time.

2012 will be the year of ‘Fees 4.0′ but to review: Fees 1.0 began in 2008 when we began paying for bags in the first place. As one airline exec explained, “You pay $12 for a hot dog at Wrigley, so why not a fee for a bag?” Trouble is, hotdogs at Wrigley weren’t free five years ago. Plus, they taste good. Bag fees, as we all know, are nearly indigestible.
And forget all those reports about proposed legislation to do away with bag fees. Every time a senator is charged a bag fee, they make a ruckus (especially during an election cycle). The legislation won’t go anywhere because those billions of dollars in fee revenue are often the only thing keeping airlines above water what with those sometimes stratospheric fuel prices.
Fees 2.0 saw airlines slapping on a sushi menu-worth of charges for all sorts of frills such as food and early boarding. For consumers, it got harder and harder to compare the total cost of a ticket from one airline to another. Fees 3.0 was the bundling of fees we see now, such as early boarding plus checked-bag plus preferred seat.
Fees 4.0 will mean higher fees (especially if oil takes another precipitous hike), plus more bundling of extras we might not have wanted to purchase separately but may succumb to after seeing them continuously discounted from pay-point to pay-point via email, on our smartphones, at the airport kiosk or even on our airplane seat back screens.
What’s love got to do with it? We may find out once KLM gets its “choose your seatmate via Facebook” plan underway. Perhaps flyers will use it to choose neighbors based on looks or hotness quotient or simply to find a quiet, easygoing seatmate (perhaps the anti-Alec Baldwin). Would you pay for this? I’m betting many will; take another look at that Seinfeld episode where Elaine is stuck in a middle seat whispering, “Help me”).

With apologies to Greyhound, we are coming to accept that flying today is like traveling by bus with few frills and even fewer fun times. Complaints about airport security are down, and I’m getting fewer angry emails about unfair bag fees. We may not like it but we’re getting used to it, and face it – air travel is still the best way of getting from Point A to Point B.
Hope all your flights in 2012 are smooth and hassle-free.
Related links:
Southwest CEO Gary Kelly Warns Cost Too High
Great, Recent Deals
Poll: Consumers Will Travel More In 2012
22nd Domestic Airfare Hike Attempt of 2011 Fails
When to Buy Airline Tickets and Other Advice
This work is the opinion of the columnist and does not reflect the opinion of ABC News.
Rick Seaney is one of the country’s leading experts on airfare, giving interviews and analysis to news organizations that include ABC News, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the Associated Press and Bloomberg. His website, FareCompare.com, offers consumers free, new-generation software, combined with expert insider tips to find the best airline ticket deals.


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