News-Record.com

This story began with some fairly mundane committee tracking Thursday, keeping tabs on what the House NER subcommittee was up to. I happened to be in the room as a couple staffers were reviewing a few tweaks to the rate the Commerce Department charges other state agencies to use three state-owned aircraft: two planes and a helicopter.

This sentence caught my ear: "If the executive aircraft is used to attend athletic events or for any other purpose related to collegiate athletics, the rate charged shall be equal to the direct cost of operating the aircraft ..."

Who's flying to what now? The committee moved on without comment, but after a bit of asking around I found out that this came up a few weeks earlier when committee members noticed that UNC was using the aircraft a lot.

Some of those uses were for things like getting the University System President to meetings of bigwigs and things like that. But a good 15 entries were logged out to UNC Chapel Hill and involved high ranking officials going to sporting events. I asked UNC to help me out with what was going on. Here' the relevant part of an e-mail I got back:

The chancellor travels by car and airplane to carry out his duties on behalf of the University. How he travels depends on the logistics of each trip and the amount of time that will be involved for travel, meetings and other events. When the chancellor travels by air, his office may elect to use:

1) The Department of Commerce airplane based at the Raleigh-Durham International Airport.

2) One of the Medical Air Operations (MedAir) airplanes based at the University's Horace Williams Airport in Chapel Hill. MedAir serves the North Carolina Area Health Education Centers Program, which brings health sciences faculty and students to regional sites across the state. University officials traveling on University business are permitted to fly on AHEC planes when space permits.

3) Commercial aircraft when it is convenient to his schedule.

The Chancellor's Office pays the standard rates charged by the Department of Commerce and AHEC for any other passengers taking their flights. The commerce department rate is a flat fee based on the use of the plane for a specific trip, not the number of passengers. So if more than one person is traveling for the same purpose the cost is less expensive than for MedAir, which charges on a per person basis.

The air service available to the chancellor permits him to use his time more efficiently. This is a time management issue. For example, he can travel to Charlotte via Med Air to participate in a meeting or attend a University event and still have as much as a half a day in the office. A Department of Commerce plane trip can permit him to spend a full day in the office and then travel out of state to a University meeting or event. The chancellor is expected to attend and represent the University at major athletic events, which provide opportunities to meet with donors and friends of the University. The chancellor's schedule often includes multiple University events on weekends, particularly during football and basketball seasons.

Still, it seems the NER committee has a concern about the whole using executive aircraft to travel to sporting events thing. It is going to require the Commerce Department charge a good deal more for this than virtually anything else the aircraft is used for.

And of course, all of this is either taxpayer or tuition or fundraised dollars, so its pretty much all public money getting sloshed around from one pot to another.

The comment lines are open.