Officials to make decision on Westward Airways today

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — Public officials from Gallup, Las Cruces and Taos will decide today if the new schedule of commercial flights Westward Airways offered them Monday is good enough to keep the struggling Nebraska-based company on board.

The three New Mexico communities calling themselves the Taos Consortium, after the fiscal agent of the group hired Westward in late 2004 to provide them with daily flights to Albuquerque and, in the case of Gallup and Las Cruces, to Phoenix. By contributing $200,000 each, they secured a $600,000 grant from the state and another $1.4 million from the federal government to pull off the deal.

Only a few months into a two-year contract, however, Westward suspended all its New Mexico flights July 14, claiming, according to consortium officials, that the company's former leaders underbid the deal.

Westward officials have declined to comment.

According to Taos Town Manager Toms Benavdez and Gallup City Attorney George Kozeliski, Westward officials claim the company is losing $50,000 a month serving the consortium.

On Friday, the group gave Westward an ultimatum: resume the service you agreed to provide in the contract or have your contract with the consortium terminated.

After a teleconference with company officials Monday afternoon, the consortium backed down.

With all their New Mexico planes still grounded, Westward officials offered the consortium a revised flight schedule.

Benavdez and Gallup Assistant City Manager Larry Binkley said the consortium agreed to review the offer and get back to Westward Wednesday.

Binkley said the offer didn't necessarily have to meet all the conditions of the original contract, but it would have to be close.

"Each member of the consortium will just have to see if their flights remain close to the original contract," he said.

If any one member is not satisfied, he said, the consortium will dump Westward.

Neither Benavdez nor Binkley would discuss the details of the offer. But so far as Taos was concerned, Benavdez said, "it's close to what we originally had."

Gallup officials have made it clear that their priority is Phoenix, which Westward connected with two round-trip flights every weekday one on weekends until suspending service July 14. What service Westward has offered to maintain to Phoenix could go far in making or breaking the company's future in New Mexico.

If their attempt to salvage the deal falls through, the consortium says it will resume its search for a provider and that Westward would be free to make another offer.

But if the company fails to fulfill its current contract, Binkley said, its chances of winning a new one could suffer.

"Its past performance would be detrimental to them in a new request for proposals," he said. "But, you know, they could turn things around and make it look attractive."

But the signs of that happening, he said, weren't good. Westward's latest activities, he confessed, suggest a company in trouble.

Binkley said Westward had suspended all its flights not only in New Mexico, but in its home state of Nebraska as well. A July 25 article in the Lincoln Journal Star quotes Westward board chairman Paul Reed calling the company "insolvent at this point in time." According to the same story, the company stopped serving North Platte, Neb., earlier this month because of a lack of passengers.

The Independent's attempts Monday afternoon to book flights from Nebraska or New Mexico all failed.