I think what AOPA is fighting is the use of public funds to build infrastructure that a private entity makes a profit by charging to use it.
A municipal airport builds a ramp with public funds, that ramp should be accessible to the public, first come, first served.
Kinda like the problem with highways created with public funds and even eminent domain, selling off lanes of the highway to private for-profit toll road companies.
You can debate a ramp fee increase at a municipal airport board meeting and even vote out the board members if they’ve lost their minds. You can’t vote away a Signature who has a sweetheart deal with the same board for use of public paid for ramp space.
Signature is sane at a lot of airports and keeps their fees “reasonable” but at some, they’re milking the public trough pretty hard.
If Signature wants to make a deal with the airport to not only collect the fees but also pay for all ramp space and maintains it themselves at their own cost, that’s not as big a problem as using the public funded ramp for their fees.
It’s either public infrastructure or it’s private. Anything co-mingled just gives you Amtrak or USPS style messes to figure out.
Some folks should eyeball their airport boards a little harder and seriously vote them out (where possible and “Airport Manager” isn’t an appointed job with no real public accountability) when they make seeetheart deals with FBOs to use public built infrastructure for direct fee private profit.
But it’s the American way. Private gains, socialized losses. Signature can make deals and effectively lock out competition at many airports where there’s no way another FBO could build and compete.
Costs them very little, make a deal with the airport as someone mentioned above that they’ll pay higher rents, and then charge anything that touches the ramp they didn’t pay for and didn’t build whatever fees they want to, in order to make those higher rent payments.
It’s an ingenious business model if nothing else.
Sometimes they’re benign and sometimes they’re charging rates that effectively lock out the low end of GA.
It’s not really new, though. Everyone around here knows you don’t fly a small GA airplane to Aspen in ski season unless you have more money for the ramp fees than it would take to fill your airplane with fuel. “Only rich jet setters truly welcome on our ramp in ski season” has been the KASE motto for decades. And they weren’t Signature.
But I can see AOPA’s point in it, even if they’re losing in the courtroom to an FAA not interested in protecting the public money invested in airports for the entire aviation public’s use.
If nothing else at least the lawsuits let us know where FAA stands on serving everyone equally. They’re happily paying their lawyers to back the private business interests, and not the public interest, by hiding behind the “whatever the local airport authority wants” excuse and making it a “local matter”.
I’m no fan of government debt spending or the fake taxes that pretend to pay the entire bill for all those loans, but if you’re going to take over something and call it public infrastructure then defend it as such.
Otherwise make the airport send the money back and spend it on airports who want to serve the entire public, not a sub-set that can afford some private for-profit company’s arbitrary fees designed to be used as bribes to the local airport authority.
Same goes for hangars and that battle has been going on for ages. If public funds for aviation were spent on the hangars, they weren’t built for the airport authority to rent them out as storage lockers for non-aviation junk.
I’m completely fine if Signature wants to pay for their own pavement privately and charge whatever they want to pay for it. There’s airports that would effectively lock out lower levels of GA doing that, if they don’t have a competing FBO and only have one.
I think they could use that as a metric somehow too... less public runway money for those airports.
But that isn’t how we roll in modern America. Build the airport with public debt and then chase the photographers off of public airport land so the jet set can have their “privacy” on a public purchased ramp.
That’s just the reality of it these days. AOPA is losing because 70% currently live paycheck to paycheck and don’t want taxes to rise to cover even inflation, let alone pay down the public debt. Public infrastructure of the past can’t be afforded, so sell it off or lease it to the highest private bidder.
Toll roads, FBO ramps, launch facilities, whatever... this is how the fire sale looks. Change of ownership hidden in sweetheart deals and exorbitant fees paid to private entities to cover the upkeep on infrastructure we all once agreed were worth calling “public”.
Small airports continue to hang on by a thread. FedGov doesn’t have the funds nor the agreement from the broke Citizenry to properly maintain them as fully public entities anymore.
Was nice while it lasted. Signature or whoever wants them, owns the profits from the ramps now. As long as they give the broke counties, cities, and other municipal type entities a cut of the action, because they’re all broke too, they get to charge what they please.
The fiscal chickens on the massive public debt come home to roost on the margins first. Aviation is seen as capable of paying its own way because the public thinks private jets mean multi-gazillionaires are the only people who use airports.
And when they’re 70% hand to mouth, they don’t have any aspirations of heading to the airport to learn to fly, ever. They want other government programs funded WAY before airports. Heck they’d even settle for getting that toll lane back before they’d pay for repaving an airport ramp, given the option.
He switched to Hill Aircraft and no such requirement. Same ramp space, maybe a different row. 
