A tiny airport that Walmart uses for its corporate jet traffic
gets a taxpayer subsidy thanks to two Arkansas lawmakers, Republican Rep. Steve Womack and Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor. The airport in Rogers, Arkansas, handles so few flights that, before Womack and Pryor sprang into action, it had to pay a percentage of the costs for its air traffic control tower, $130,00 a year at the time the lawmakers passed their bill capping the amount such small airports have to pay. As a result, the Rogers airport now pays just $81,000, instead of having seen its share rise to close to $200,000 as would have happened without the congressional intervention. While the law covers any airport that would have had to pay more than 20 percent of its tower's costs, just five airports qualify.
What does this have to do with Walmart? Well, the company's 19 jets account for more than 20 percent of the airport's traffic, and:
“My city was unique because I happen to have a pretty sizable five-and-dime company there that has its fleet of aircraft based there and a lot of vendor traffic coming in and out,” Womack said at a March 8, 2012, hearing of the House Appropriations Committee’s transportation sub-panel.
Never mind that "a lot of vendor traffic" plus the Walmart jets didn't actually add up to much in the grand scheme of things: The Rogers airport handled the fourth-lowest number of flights of any airport with a tower. Plenty of small airports function safely without air traffic control towers. But this one is special, so special that Congress needed to protect it—or protect its biggest customer from having the costs of a tower passed along from the airport.
The amount of this subsidy is peanuts compared to the taxpayer subsidies Walmart gets in the form of food stamps and other government assistance for the workers it doesn't pay enough to live. But it really goes to show the lengths Congress will go to to make sure Walmart is never inconvenienced.