About 60 employees of Devcon Construction were set to show up at Oakland International Airport on Monday to continue working on the airport's brand-new air traffic control tower.
That is, until they were told not to, until further notice. "We were informed Friday to stop all construction activity," said Dan Anello, a project manager at the Milpitas-based company.
That was when, the House, in its infinite wisdom, refused to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration's operating authority, resulting in the partial shutdown of the agency, the halting of funds for dozens of similar projects nationwide, and further additions to the nation's unemployment rolls.
"Because Congress didn't do its work, FAA programs and thousands of public- and private-sector jobs are in jeopardy," Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood told reporters in a conference call Monday morning.
Air traffic controllers are unaffected as are safety inspectors and, so far, airline schedules. But 4,000 FAA employees have been furloughed, including 23 in the Bay Area, along with Devcon Construction's workers, and others throughout the country, for whom stopped projects mean stopped pay.
All told, $2.5 billion worth of airport construction projects, from Palm Springs to Las Vegas and New York's La Guardia airport, according to LaHood, are stranded on the runway, so to speak.
And, oh yes, the federal government is losing $30 million a day in revenue. That's because the FAA is funded in part by transportation taxes, including a 7.5 percent excise tax added to domestic ticket prices, which the FAA no longer has the authority to collect.
(We'll get to whether this has resulted in an unexpected break for air travelers in a moment.)
"They could do it today": So what manifestation of Washington "dysfunction" are we talking about here?
Since 2007, the FAA has been funded via a series - 20, count them - of short-term extension bills. No. 21 came a cropper when House Republicans demanded the reversal of a federal ruling last year allowing airline and railroad employees to unionize via a simple majority of voters.
Republicans demanded a return to a previous rule that treated non-voters as "no" voters, an idea Senate Democrats rejected and President Obama threatened to veto. The GOP majority also added, at the last minute, three additional small, rural airports to a list of 10 already facing drastic subsidy cuts.
"These items could easily be taken out and discussed later, and a clean extension bill passed said LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, who supported Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the last presidential election.
"I've already asked Congress. They could do it today. There's no excuse for them not to pass a clean bill."
Eating away: Until they do, here's some of the local fallout.
-- Oakland airport's half-completed $31 million, 236-foot-tall tower project, replacing its 50- and 40-year-old towers, is at a standstill. Other grants, for runway-safety improvements, for example, have been delayed, said airport spokeswoman Rosemary Barnes.
Devcon Construction, meanwhile, is eating $6,000 a day in operating costs, according to Anello. The most immediate concern, he said, is that work on fireproofing the new tower has been stopped. Should the delay stretch much past the summer, inclement weather would disrupt the installation of utilities, he added.
"The scary portion for us is the indefinite nature of all this," he said.
-- FAA approval of San Francisco International Airport's planned taxiway modifications to handle Boeing's forthcoming 747-800 jumbo jets is in abeyance. So far, three cargo aircraft companies, which SFO officials wouldn't name, have expressed interest in flying the jets in and out of SFO.
-- If the FAA imbroglio is not resolved by August, the latest phase of Mineta San Jose International Airport's $55 million taxiway extension project, scheduled to begin in September, will likely be delayed, with more than 80 construction jobs at risk.
"We're moving ahead with everything under our control," said the San Jose airport's spokesman David Vossbrink. "We'll be ready to go, assuming the FAA is back in business."
Take the money and run: When the Bay Area's Virgin America airline got wind of the FAA situation late Friday, it immediately announced it was deducting the 7.5 percent tax the agency could no longer collect, calling the discounted ticket price a "tax holiday" for consumers.
Actually, more like a holiday for the airlines. By Monday, "given the dynamic nature of fares," said a Virgin America spokeswoman, "some fares have changed and/or moved up, but the discount is still available on some routes."
That's more than can be said for most other airlines, which, while ceasing to impose the 7.5 percent excise tax, have, quite coincidentally, added the same amount to their ticket prices anyway.
"Consumers are not impacted because they're paying the same fare as last week," explained a spokeswoman for the Air Transport Association, the airline industry's trade group. "But it helps the airlines improve their very narrow margins, albeit for a very short space of time."
Secretary LaHood, for one, is not pleased. While refusing to endorse the label "farejacking" offered by one reporter on the conference call, he said "airlines are reaping windfall profits from this."
LaHood said he had conveyed his views to the Air Transport Association but acknowledged, "We can't tell airlines what to charge."
The ATA spokeswoman said the organization's CEO, Nicholas Calio, had talked with LaHood but would not characterize the substance of the conversation.
"Pricing is an individual business decision," she reminded me.
