# Plain Language Summary: Small Airport Regulation Relief Act of 2023

This bill helps small airports that have been hit hard by the pandemic get back on their feet. It's about how the federal government distributes money to airports for improvements and maintenance through something called the Airport Improvement Program. Normally, the government bases these payments on how many passengers flew through an airport in the most recent year. But for small airports, that created a problem: many saw their passenger numbers drop dramatically during 2020 and 2021 when travel plummeted due to COVID-19, and they haven't fully recovered yet.

The bill gives these struggling small airports a break for three years (2024, 2025, and 2026). Instead of using current passenger numbers to calculate their federal funding, airports with fewer than 10,000 passengers per year can use their best year from 2019, 2020, or 2021 to get their money. This means if an airport had 15,000 passengers in 2019 but only 8,000 in 2023, it can use the 2019 number to get more federal funding. The catch is that the airport must have had at least 10,000 passengers in 2019 to qualify for this special treatment—so it's specifically designed for airports that were doing okay before the pandemic but got knocked down by it.

In practical terms, this means small regional airports in rural areas and smaller cities will receive more federal dollars for runway repairs, terminal improvements, and other infrastructure projects during these three years. This could help them maintain their facilities and services while they work on rebuilding their passenger numbers back to pre-pandemic levels.

Small Airport Regulation Relief Act of 2023

Barrasso, John

Small Airport Regulation Relief Act of 2023 This bill allows commercial service airports that do not meet the minimum passenger boarding requirement to continue to receive certain Airport Improvement Program (AIP) funding from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for a limited time. The AIP provides grants for planning and development projects at public-use airports, including primary airports. Under current law, primary airports are generally commercial service airports that have more than 10,000 passenger boardings each year. Specifically, this bill creates a special rule for FY2024-FY2026 for commercial service airports that (1) had fewer than 10,000 passenger boardings during the calendar year used to calculate the apportionment, and (2) had 10,000 or more passenger boarding in calendar year 2019. For the purpose of AIP grant apportionment, the bill requires the FAA to use the number of passenger boardings at the airport during calendar year 2019, 2020, or 2021 (whichever had the highest number of passenger boardings).