Donald Cohen, executive director of In the Public Interest, reports on a billionaire’s ambition to privatize the St. Louis airport.

The billionaire in question is Rex Sinquefeld. He is the very same billionaire who pushes charters and vouchers. He just hates anything public.

Cohen writes:

“When the Federal Aviation Administration accepted the city’s application for federal support to privatize Lambert International Airport in April, few were surprised. The Trump administration is pushing for more private financing of infrastructure, and even has proposed a federal bonus for local and state governments that sell or lease assets like roads and airports (called “asset recycling”).

“The bigger the thing you privatize, the more money we’ll give you,” said Gary Cohn, director of Trump’s National Economic Council and former president of Goldman Sachs.

“But many wondered what’s in it for St. Louis. The airport is in good shape both physically and fiscally—it draws in $6 million annually to help fund city services.

“Turns out Sinquefield is singlehandedly bankrolling the application process. He sees it as an trade-off: selling off or leasing the airport to private investors would make up for the lost revenue of lowering taxes.

“Privatizing Lambert International Airport would be foolish for a number of reasons. Without careful scrutiny and protections, such “public-private partnerships” lower job quality and threaten to limit transparency and democratic decision-making for decades. They’re also risky—Chicago lost nearly a billion dollars leasing its downtown meters to Wall Street in 2008.”

Why does Sinquefeld want to sell off the city’s airport? Money and power. More important, shrink the public sector.

“And it has a lot to do with cutting taxes for the rich. Corporate America and Wall Street recognize the value of public assets like roads, airports, and water systems to a healthy society and growing economy. But they don’t want to pay for them—no, they want to profit off of them.

“Trump’s infrastructure agenda is light on details, but we know one thing—it would make a handful of people like Sinquefield even richer, many of them with connections to the president. D.J. Gribbin, Trump’s infrastructure advisor, used to work for Macquarie, an Australian financial firm that just so happens to be one of the investors in play to take over the airport in St. Louis.

“Public goods are meant to benefit everyone, not the few—that’s what makes them public.”