Bridgetown, Barbados,

Bridgetown, Barbados, Monday, July 20, 2009 – The Narcotics Affairs Section of the Embassy of the United States to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean, together with the U.S. State Department International Narcotics and Law Enforcement (INL), is sponsoring 5 participants from Antigua, Barbados, Grenada and St Lucia to attend the 22nd International Officers’ Training Conference in Orlando, Florida from July 21 – 24, 2009.
This Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) conference will have over 1,500 DARE officers, educators and school administrators in attendance. Over 40 different training workshops will be offered to participants. These include helping communities respond to the abuse of prescription and over the counter drugs; creating and maintaining a secure school atmosphere; internet crimes directed toward children; classroom management; school violence prevention; narco terrorism; cyber bullying; juvenile violence caused by alcohol; and the invisible threat of inhalant abuse.
This program responds to priorities identified during United States Attorney General Eric Holder’s visit to Barbados and is part of America’s continuing engagement with its Caribbean partners, which will be further strengthened through the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative that President Obama announced at the 2009 Summit of the Americas.

By David Esler
A "perfect storm" of challenges to business aircraft ownership - whether whole or fractional - is brewing in Washington, D.C., and beyond with potential far-reaching impact not only on aircraft ownership but the managed-aircraft charter business model.
Mechanisms that have traditionally served as incentives to business aircraft ownership could come under scrutiny as the Obama administration and Congress, strapped for cash after disbursing nearly a trillion dollars in stimulus and bailout payments to banks, industry and states, seek funds to service a growing deficit and underwrite ambitious health care and environmental programs plus an expanded war in Afghanistan.
And just when general aviation thought that the specter of user fees had been beaten down, it appears it may rise again, allowing airlines to shed their tax obligations. Add to this the possibility of mandated cap-and-trade purchases for each ton of CO2 emitted by an aircraft as part of the administration's climate change legislation and the always-dependable assumption that fuel prices will continue to rise, and it's likely that owning and operating a private aircraft is going to get more expensive. And waiting just over the horizon to are the considerable outlays necessary for NextGen avionics equipage.
As Nel Stubbs, vice president and co-owner at Conklin & de Decker consultants in Phoenix, notes, "People will buy airplanes no matter what, but things like how we purchase assets are changing. The IRS is looking at people for excise taxes and ratcheting up enforcement. States are cracking down on owners as well, doing away with some exemptions, increasing sales taxes, ratcheting up enforcement of existing rules and regs. . . . None of this will go entirely against ownership, as people will find ways [but] all of these government entities are coming out at this time. . . ."
Thirst for Revenue
"Everything is currently at risk," Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), whose district includes Wichita, told us, because there is "a huge thirst for revenue in this Congress. The projected expenditures for FY2009 are close to $4 trillion, and our revenue will be something like $2 trillion, so we will have a deficit of almost $2 trillion. So this places the bonus depreciation allowance at risk. This is also why they are considering a cap-and-trade program as part of the Climate Change Bill - what I call 'cap and tax' - because it is a potential revenue source."
Tiahrt is also concerned about the user fee threat. If one thinks about the direction of the current Congress, he points out, it is obvious that his fellow legislators on the other side of the aisle are "growing the size of government." And, he maintains, the bigger the government, the greater the tendency to advocate legislation that hampers business. Specifically, he cites pseudo taxes like the user fees on general aviation, long advocated by the Bush administration and now being embraced by the Obama administration and some of its partisans in Congress.
"Some people want to enact user fees as a mechanism for paying for ATC modernization," Tiahrt said. "This is not a practical solution to collect revenue, like a fuel tax, as you would then have to create a version of the IRS within the FAA to collect the fees, and it and would have a detrimental effect on air travel, especially general aviation and business aviation." He cited Europe, "where they have assessed user fees for some time," and the population of general aviation aircraft per capita is lower than in the United States, due, he claimed, to the higher operating cost. "I don't want to see that imposed on America because we would then produce and operate fewer aircraft."
While the current FAA reauthorization bills do not contain a provision for general aviation user fees, Tiahrt noted that "the President had a placeholder in his FY2010 budget to examine user fees again as a funding mechanism. There is a great deal of resistance to it in the House and the Senate, but there are some who would like to shift the cost of travel from the airlines to business aviation."
GAMA President Pete Bunce reflected, "Each administration looks to this as an option for revenue raising in tight budget times. We know that due to the economy and the bailouts the government is looking for all kinds of ways to relieve pressure on the general fund." There is widespread acceptance in Congress that a user fees system will create "political problems," Bunce said, "including causing the bureaucracy to be inflated."