County Board Will Vote on Airport Ride-Share Fees

Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. Photo by Graham Kilmer.

In December, the Milwaukee County Board will vote on an ordinance change increasing fees charged to rideshare companies at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport.

The 2025 county budget includes revenue assumptions for the airport based on the facility’s plans to begin levying a $3 charge on transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft for both picking up and dropping off rides at the airport. Currently, the airport only charges a $3 fee for pickups.

The charges go directly to the corporations, not the drivers. Adding the additional charge for drop-offs will increase revenue from these fees by approximately $976,000, bringing in a projected $1,686,000 next year, the airport has estimated.

Most comparable airports have pick up and drop off fees, and the going rate is $3 for both, according to a report by airport officials.

When rideshare companies entered the market a little over a decade ago, the industry was largely unregulated and local governments struggled with how to treat them. The same goes for airports.

Since then pick-up and drop-off fees started popping up at airports around the country. Rideshare companies, like other transportation services that make money ferrying travelers to and from the airport, benefit financially from the “mere existence” of publicly-controlled facilities like the airport, the report argued. The fees are a way to capture revenue.

“Commercial ground transportation providers [including Uber and Lyft] pay fees to operate at the Airport, however, there is currently no drop-off fee for [rideshare companies],” said Harold Mester, Director of Public Affairs and Marketing for Milwaukee Mitchell, in a previous Urban Milwaukee story. “The Airport receives zero tax dollars from Milwaukee County and is entirely funded by user fees. This fee shows one of the ways that users of the Airport pay for the Airport.”

The airport already has the authority under existing statutes to levy fees on rideshare companies. However, airport officials are proposing a sweeping rewrite of the county’s ordinances related to transportation companies using the airport in a more “generalized and consolidated fashion for easier administration,” according to the report.

Over the years, the ordinances for the airport have been added piecemeal and never rewritten holistically, making them “challenging to administer” and increasing the chance of “inadvertent noncompliance and conflict between the ordinances and other applicable rules and standards governing the Airport,” according to the report.

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