The opening of the new facility, Mayor Kasim Reed said in a prepared statement, “is a major milestone for Hartsfield-Jackson airport and the City of Atlanta.”

It is also a very expensive milestone, as well as a smaller milestone than what city officials had originally envisioned.

When the initial plans were drawn up for the international terminal back in the 1990s, the facility was designed to have 16 gates serving international flights and carried an estimated price tag of $688 million.

By the time it actually opened for business, the terminal had been cut back to 12 gates. The cost of the facility, meanwhile, had soared to more than $1.58 billion.

While Atlanta’s dignitaries were presiding over the opening ceremonies for the international terminal, Common Cause Georgia held its own news conference Wednesday to talk about how those costs had ballooned and examine some of the ethical questions that have been raised about the bidding and contracting procedures.

The expensive project, which was overseen primarily by the administrations of Reed and former mayor Shirley Franklin, has been a “pay to play” effort from the first, Common Cause Executive Director William Perry contended.

“It’s a history we can’t deny, but it’s a history we can try to correct and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Perry said.

Perry and Dale Cardwell, a former investigative reporter for WSB-TV who is now assisting Common Cause with its research into the airport project, laid out a detailed accounting of the money spent on the terminal, the campaign dollars that flowed to Franklin and Reed from persons trying to get a piece of the project and airport concession contracts, and whether it was even necessary to spend so much money on the edifice.

Cardwell noted that a number of unforeseen events – the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the bankruptcy filing of Delta Air Lines and the recession of 2008 – had cut down on international air travel through Hartsfield Airport.

As a result, he said that Concourse E, which had handled the airport’s international flights, was far below capacity in terms of the number of passengers using it.

According to experts he had interviewed, Cardwell said, Hartsfield’s international passenger needs could have been handled easily by adding more gates to Concourse E, which would have cost an estimated $300 million to $400 million, rather building a redundant international terminal at a cost of nearly $1.6 billion.

“That would have been far less expensive than what we wound up constructing,” Cardwell contended, adding that the separate terminal was “hugely over-priced and not needed.”

Perry has been quarreling with Reed for several months over what Common Cause describes as the “pay to play” aspect involved in such airport projects as soliciting bids for $3 billion worth of concession contracts.

Common Cause researchers have determined that Franklin, while she was mayor, received more than $644,000 in political contributions from airport vendors and contractors during the 2002-05 period, Perry said.

Shortly before she left office in 2009, Franklin negotiated a new lease arrangement with Delta on what were considered to be terms very favorable to the airline giant. Franklin was later appointed to Delta’s board of directors, where she is paid $40,000 a year, Perry said.

After researching Reed’s campaign disclosure reports, Common Cause has determined that the current mayor received more than $195,000 in political contributions “from winning bidders alone in the airport concession contracting process,” Perry said. “We haven’t even gotten around to looking at the unsuccessful bidders.”

The activities discussed by Perry and Cardwell at Wednesday’s news conference are a familiar story to those who’ve been watching developments at the airport.

During the administrations of Maynard Jackson, there was an unending stream of media reports describing how lucrative airport contracts kept being awarded to companies and concessionaires that were run by friends and relatives of the late mayor.

In one of those ironies peculiar to Georgia projects, the new airport facility has been officially named the “Maynard H. Jackson Jr. International Terminal.”

© 2012 by The Georgia Report