The most popular airport in all the land, apparently. (File Photo)
The man in charge of Dallas Love Field wants the city to build a single rental-car facility at the airport — and get visitors to pay for it.
It wouldn’t be a small facility: Mark Duebner, Dallas’ director of aviation, told the City Council’s Economic Development Committee on Monday morning it would need to be around 1.1 million square feet. And it wouldn’t be cheap: He estimated it could run anywhere from $230 million to $270 million. There could also be other costs associated with the so-called Consolidated Rental Car Facility, including land acquisition and what it costs to run shuttles to and from the terminal.
But Dallasites wouldn’t pay for the facility. Instead, Duebner told the council, it would be funded via a customer facility charge, one of those hidden fees buried in car-rental bills at most airports. Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, for instance, charges car-rental customers $4 per day, plus an additional $2.20-per-day “transportation fee,” according to Monday’s briefing.
The council would need to approve an ordinance allowing for the collection of the facility charge — and Duebner asked the council to do it sooner than later, if possible, so the city could stash some cash to design and build the facility that would house all the rental-car companies currently operating out of Love. (That number could change: Their contracts come due in 2017, at which point the city will issue new requests from proposals from interested parties.)
There’s also a good chance Dallas might have to buy land for the facility: Two of the four possible sites aren’t owned by the city. One’s the current home of the ParkingSpot on Cedar Springs Road on land owned by Southwest Airlines. Duebner said the city was “in discussions with Southwest about acquiring” the land but that nothing would be done until the new parking garage — Garage C — was built and opened. The other — along Mockingbird Lane, past Denton Drive — is in the hands of several property owners and adjacent to the airport’s remote parking lot.
One of the other two options is an existing car-rental building whose overhaul would probably be “too expensive” to justify.
Duebner told the council that most airports charge a facility fee, and that “regardless of what that charge is, it really hasn’t affected any of the demand” at those airports.
“When folks come to town and they want to rent a car,” he said, “they’re not looking at the bill and making buy/no-buy decisions based on that.” … [visit site to read more]
