Transportation to the Tampa Airport is about to get more expensive. Under pressure from the Tampa Taxi Cartel, the Tampa Airport has announced plans to impose fees upon the limousine services that the residents up and down Florida's Central West Coast depends on for transportation to and from this regional interstate transportation hub.
Walter Kozak, President of the Florida Intrastate Transportation Alliance (FITA) a nonprofit group dedicated to ridding the nonpublic transportation industry of abusive economic regulation is spearheading a campaign to bring pressure upon the airport to drop its ill advised plans.
"First we have the Hillsborough County Public Transportation Commission (HCPTC) setting the nail by forcing folks residing in other counties to use expensive luxury limousine style transportation and now the Tampa Airport wants to hammer that nail home by adding to the cost the travelers must lay out" comments Kozak.
Kozak continues, " in the outlying counties such as Hernando and Citrus, the primary traveler is a retired senior citizen, living on a fixed income and often suffering from some sort of physical impairments. For them, nonpublic intercounty transportation to the airport is a necessity not a luxury that the airport should attack as a cash cow. It's bad enough that they have to pay top dollar due to the economic regulatory imposed by the HCPTC in its protectionism of the Tampa Taxi Cartel."
"TIA's Executive Director Louis Miller uses the "lets play fair game" by quoting to the press that the two major taxicab companies pay the airport a combined $400,000 a year and limousines pay nothing to enter and load their arriving prearranged or chartered passengers. That $400,000 a year is for the right to solicit business at the airport and is not an option available to limousines and therefore has nothing to do with the issue at hand of placing additional regulatory costs upon the traveling consumer. What is an issue is the simple fact that the Florida Government has failed to provide adequate public transit to the transportation hubs from the outlying counties and is failing to protect the nonpublic passenger transportation services from abusive economic regulation that drives the traveling costs up for the consumer."
Kozak finishes with, "for the past month and a half my attorney has in his possession a rough Federal Complaint to be filed against the State of Florida covering in part , undue burdens placed on interstate commerce. A call went in today for him to get it into second gear so this complaint can be in the Federal Court within two weeks. For too long the State has ignored the needs of the traveling consumer while the local taxicab fed regulatory agencies have been ripping off the consumers and violating federal and state transportation and commerce laws. It's time to put these issues in front of a Federal Judge."
