When the state legislature completed its new 2011 budget last week, lawmakers did not include a surprising, last-minute proposal from Gov. M. Jodi Rell and Lt. Gov. Mike Fedele: reorganizing Bradley International Airport as a "quasi-public" agency, which Rell and Fedele said would yield $25 million a year in new revenue.this handy fact sheet from the Florida Department of Transportation, the major prevailing piece of legislation on this case stemmed from a similar case. The City of Los Angeles, hurting for cash to support public services like fire and police departments, tried to use revenues from LAX to cover their shortfall. this federal rule-making, the policy reason for this is that Congress and the federal government want airports to be "as self-sustaining as possible"; that is, they don't want airports to subsist on federal taxpayer grants while diverting portions of their profits to other government agencies because no one at the state level wants to cut or raise taxes.

Turns out it might be a good thing that the legislature took a pass.

Rell's proposal would not only have predicted a surge in gross revenues at the airport from the reorganization, it would have used that $25 million revenue stream to back the revenue bonds with which Rell and Democrats had agreed to close the 2011 state deficit.

But a cursory examination of airport rules makes it pretty clear that the state simply cannot do that.

Airports that receive federal aid are barred from engaging in what the DOT and FAA call "revenue diversion" -- that is, they're not allowed to spend revenues raised in their federally regulated airports for a purpose unrelated to operations or improvements of those airports.

And as you can see in

Federal agencies said no, and Congress has passed at least two laws banning such revenue diversion.

As you can read in the background of

The same document explains that the 1996 bill reauthorizing the FAA permits the secretary to recoup up to three times the amount of misdirected money if it finds that an airport's funds were unlawfully diverted.

Now, some revenues, like sales tax on purchases in the terminals at Bradley, would flow straight to the state. That's money that wouldn't be diverted.

But, as many reporters asked when Rell and Fedele proposed this the other day, are the chief executive and would-be chief executive of the state really saying they could have sold $25 million more cups of airport coffee by converting Bradley to a different organizational structure?

When pressed on this question in repeated interviews, Fedele, a candidate for governor, said that the major area of revenue growth from this proposal would be through the increased ability of Bradley executives to sign long-term contracts with airlines that would guarantee a base load of passengers for the airlines, in exchange for commitments to keep up service to new destinations. But the primary yield of such contracts would be landing fees and gate fees paid by the airlines. And federal law says you can't take that money away from an airport and use it to pay schoolteachers or pay off your deficit bonds.

Now here's the weird part: You might think that an administration that wanted to propose an innovative new scheme to drive up airport profits and borrow against them to balance the budget would have checked with the department that currently runs said airport to ensure that the plan was legal.

You'd be wrong.

A source in the administration said the state Department of Transportation "was not consulted in advance on the Bradley quasi-public proposal and was completely taken by surprise by it." The proposal, the source said, originated with Joan McDonald, the commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development. (A spokesman there didn't return a call for comment last week.)

An inquiry to the DOT, asking if the department had been asked about the practicality or legality of the Bradley plan, yielded the following from spokesman Judd Everhart: "I am not aware of any past study regarding the idea and how it would or wouldn't work with federal aviation requirements."

I was talking to Rep. Cameron Staples, D-New Haven, the co-chairman of the legislature's Finance Committee, on the House floor a few hours before the actual budget deal was finally passed. When he learned that the Bradley fund transfer was likely impermissible under federal law, and at any rate hadn't even been checked out before it was proposed in a gubernatorial press conference, Staples largely held his tongue -- the Democrats and Rell had, after all, finally been able to strike a deal, so why ruin the mood.

But he did say that Democrats largely ignored the Bradley proposal when Rell offered it, since it seemed to have come out of left field, no one knew anything about it, and lawmakers weren't sure what it might eventually do.

They weren't the only ones.