Silver Airways, avoiding potential eviction, will stay at Fort Lauderdale’s airport

Silver Airways on Tuesday avoided a potential eviction and will keep offering flights from Fort Lauderdale’s airport after striking an agreement to resolve more than a million dollars of debt.

The move comes a week after a threat from Broward County that the airline could be forced out of Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, and after union leaders’ pleas for an extension on the necessary payments.

At 9 p.m. Monday, on the eve of a meeting Tuesday to discuss the airline’s months-old unpaid bills and to vote on whether to terminate the airline’s lease, county officials and Silver Airways agreed on a plan: The airline would immediately pay $200,000 toward its balance, and the rest would be on a payment plan through April 2024.

The security deposit replenishment will be last, to be repaid by May 2024.

The County Commission unanimously signed off on the deal Tuesday, which meant Silver was required to wire the first $200,000 payment Tuesday.

Steve Rossum, the CEO for Silver Airways, pledged there would be timely payments, and said the company would “do a better job to rebuild” trust. “We will be current going forward,” he said. “We did not pay our bills,” he acknowledged, and the agreement was fair to everybody.

Silver Airways, which offers flights to major cities in Florida and the Bahamas, owed Broward County more than $1.4 million as of Monday, according to county records. The airline has been in default since September, according to a copy of the latest agreement released Tuesday.

Silver officials said most of the outstanding deficit stems from a county assessment of $711,000 they had not budgeted for, and the county’s interest rate of 18%.

[ RELATED: Don’t force Silver Airways out of Fort Lauderdale’s airport, unions tell Broward officials ]

As the airline worked to resolve its bills with Broward, officials at other Florida airports detailed how much money Silver Airlines needs to pay them.

At Tampa International Airport, the airline has owed $173,441, a total that has been accumulating since February, according to airport spokesman Joshua Gillin. The bill includes rent for March and April, he said.

There have been a “couple repeat notices for invoices” that had not been responded to, he said Tuesday. So “sometime this week” the legal department will get involved with a notice of payment being due, he said.

Rossum said Tuesday he was not aware of any default notice.

Silver Airways is a South Florida airline that offers flights to major cities in Florida and the Bahamas. (Carline Jean / South Florida Sun Sentinel)

And at Orlando International Airport, Silver Airways was estimated to owe more than $324,000, but there was a credit that hadn’t been applied and so the amount due was expected to change, Carolyn Fennell, spokeswoman for the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, said last week.

If the airline were to have been forced out of the airport in Fort Lauderdale, it would have resulted in the “dissolution of Silver Airways,” warned Sean O’Brien, general president for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which represents the pilots, in a correspondence to the county.

Silver has 883 employees, 323 of those are based or live in Broward County.

“It’s unfortunate that we’ve gotten to this point,” Mark Gale, the director of Aviation at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, told county commissioners. He told commissioners there had been payment “issues” that dated pre-pandemic but became “more significant” in 2021.

The county made an effort to find Silver Airways in default in January 2022, but the airline made a plea. It was getting ready to “close on a deal” that would allow it to make a payment to the airport, and a default would’ve jeopardized that. So the county held off, and a “significant” payment followed, but the outstanding debt “started to climb again,” Gale said. Another default came in September 2022.

Rossum said after the meeting that the “deal” was in the works to raise money to pay its bills in Broward and elsewhere.

If Silver were to default on its payment plan during the next year, the agreement will be terminated.

Gale said the deal was in the best interest of all parties and “hopefully we’ll be able to see them prosper and move forward and grow.”

County leaders said they hoped for the best. “I just hate to see this become ... a bad cycle on chasing payments,” said Commissioner Tim Ryan.

“I just hope it will be a good working relationship,” said County Commissioner Mark Bogen.

Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at [email protected]. Follow on Twitter @LisaHuriash