Air taxi operators said they overpaid. Juneau is redoing its fees.

Juneau's airport is proposing to cut fuel fees by roughly two-thirds and raise landing fees to make up the difference — a shift in who carries the cost of running the airfield.

Under rates the Airport Board's finance committee has recommended for the coming fiscal year, the fee charged on each gallon of fuel pumped would fall from 30 cents to about 9 cents for scheduled jet carriers, and from 33 cents to about 10 cents for the smaller air taxis that serve Southeast communities. Operators without a signed agreement with the airport, who pay a 25 percent premium, would drop from about 41 cents to 13 cents. Landing fees move the other way, rising from $3.34 to about $5.45 per 1,000 pounds of aircraft weight.

Airport Manager Andres Delgado said the change comes from reallocating revenue from airfield land leases between the airport's separate accounts. Dividing that money differently across cost centers, he said, "raised the landing fees and lowered the field flowage fees." The airport's longstanding 85/15 allocation framework stayed in place for these rates; whether to revisit that formula is part of a separate modernization effort.

The rewrite follows a complaint from the operators who fly the small planes. In a December letter, Jodi Garza of Alaska Seaplanes, joined by other Part 135 operators, said a 2019 calculation error had caused the airport to over-collect from them and was never corrected. Delgado said staff hoped the new model "addressed the rates and fees calculation error." He also confirmed a separate problem: a fiscal 2024 fund balance had been overstated by $700,000.

Terminal rents would rise 18 to 20 percent, partly to fund a deputy airport manager position. Alaska Airlines and Delta objected over the cost impact.

The board approved up to $100,000 on Sept. 10 to hire consultants to work on the following year's rates.