The City of Prince Albert and Transwest Air are working through some turbulence.
A year-long dispute over money owed to the City from TransWest Air – or whether it owed money at all, depending on who you talked to – ran into a wall last week. The City pulled its offer sent an eviction letter to Transwest. The letter pulled a five-year lease offer for terminal space at the municipal airport, effective January 1.
City manager Jim Toye’s reasoning behind the action was he’d felt threatened by comments made by TransWest. TransWest COO Garrett Lawless responded with confusion about where that impression came from.
When it became clear through media coverage that both sides had different views on their working relationship, a series of meetings followed.
Lawless said a meeting with Mayor Greg Dionne led to concessions on both sides when it came to the money owed, which was related to payments for terminal upgrades.
“We agreed to pay the half the amount that they had originally demanded, so we paid them the $7,500,” Lawless said.
“The mayor did step in and ultimately it was the mayor that offered resolution and I’m very grateful to the mayor for doing so. And moving forward I believe the City manager and TransWest Air will be able to function together and effect good business.”
The five-year lease was also agreed to at the time, Lawless said.
A second meeting was held between Toye, the airport manager, the public works director and two other top guns at TransWest Air to further smooth things out. Lawless wasn’t present.
“I think what we said is, we can’t do anything about yesterday, but what we can do is something about tomorrow. So yeah, it could have been handled differently and we both did admit that, and moving forward we want to do it in a very positive, proactive way,” Toye said.
In Toye’s view, the relationship is now on the mend.
“We shook hands, and basically said that if we have any issues here we’ll try to handle them locally and if we couldn’t that my phone would be open and the president’s phone would be open and we would handle them there then.”
There’s still a lot of smoothing left to do though.
Lawless had previously expressed frustration with the letter the city sent last week, saying the action doesn’t reflect well on how the City deals with businesses.
In response to that, Toye referred to the recent dealings with TransWest Air as an anomaly.
“I don’t recall one other contract or one other partner stepping up and saying such things about the City, so sometimes it’s a one-off situation. I mean, I would stand behind our record for the last few years and saying that we’ve made some very positive steps regarding the business community and how we do business in the city,” he said.