TransWest Air’s COO Garrett Lawless. Photo courtesy transwestair.com
TransWest Air announced big future plans for growth earlier this year, but right now it’s experiencing some growing pains.
On Monday, the airline received a letter giving one-month’s notice that its terminal lease at Prince Albert Municipal Airport will not be renewed.
The City of Prince Albert owns the municipal airport, and has cancelled the offer of a five-year lease that was meant to start in January.
The City of Prince Albert says TransWest Air has refused the agreement’s terms. From the perspective of TransWest Air’s Chief Operations, Garrett Lawless, that’s confusing. He said he’d believed the two parties had been on the cusp of settling a past issue with past terminal fees.
“All we’d stated, in response to the City’s most recent offer to us, was that we wanted to speak to our legal counsel before making a decision. Somehow the City interpreted our request to speak to legal counsel before we made a decision as a refusal of their proposed terms,” Lawless said.
He describes his reaction to receiving the letter as one of disbelief and confusion. In his view, the City’s eviction notice comes as a response to the mention of seeking a judicial resolution by Lawless. He said he doesn’t see that behavior as hostile or worthy of the letter sent to TransWest Air on Monday.
“There’s no winner in this situation,” he said.
He says he’s willing to speak to City Manager Jim Toye about a possible resolution.
Lawless is staying optimistic about the company’s future. TransWest Air still owns a hangar at Prince Albert Municipal Airport.
He’s considering renovating a terminal out of that hangar, to support its heavy traffic through Prince Albert. This would allow TransWest Air to maintain its level of service without disrupting flights to northern Saskatchewan, he said.
“We’ve been given exceptionally short notice to construct a new space: we have one month and that month just happens to be Christmas so it’s not like we even have an entire month.”
He does acknowledge the City has followed the letter of the law with how much notice it’s given but adds TransWest would have to pay a premium to get that work done.
Lawless still says the future is looking good for TransWest overall, but it will take a different shape than he’d anticipated.
“We have grand plans for the future. The only thing that’s changed is we won’t be able to do those developments here in Prince Albert, that much does seem clear. And that is a little bit heartbreaking for us, I mean my home is in Prince Albert, our headquarters is here in Prince Albert. This airport is named after one of the founding people for our company. This is the city where we saw these future operations being based,” he said.
After multiple calls to the office of City Manager Jim Toye, he was unavailable for comment on Wednesday.