356
Syllabus
Held: 1. The Court declines to decide whether there is a private right of action under the AHTA but assumes, for purposes of this case, that the right exists. A prevailing party may defend a judgment on any ground properly raised below, without filing a cross-petition, so long as that party seeks to preserve, and not to change, the judgment. The Airport did not cross-petition on the CFR issue it lost below, and resolving the private right of action issue in its favor would alter that portion of the judgment. Pp. 364-365. 2. The Airport's fees have not been shown to be unreasonable under the AHTA. Pp. 365-373. (a) The AHTA sets no standards for determining a fee's reasonableness. In the absence of guidance from the Secretary of Transportation, the Court adopts the parties' suggestion to resolve the reasonableness issue using the standards stated in Evansville-Vanderburgh Airport Authority Dist. v. Delta Airlines, Inc., 405 U. S. 707, for determining reasonableness under the Commerce Clause. Although Congress enacted the AHTA because it found unsatisfactory the end result in Evansville—the validation of "head" taxes—§ 1513(b) permits "reasonable" charges and the Evansville formulation has been used to determine "reasonableness" in related contexts, see, e. g., American Trucking Assns., Inc. v. Scheiner, 483 U. S. 266, 289-290. Thus, the levy here is reasonable if it (1) is based on some fair approximation of the facilities' use, (2) is not excessive in relation to the benefits conferred, and (3) does not discriminate against interstate commerce. Evansville, supra, at 716-717. Pp. 365-369. (b) The Airport's decision to allocate air-operations costs to the Airlines and general aviation, but not to the concessions, appears to "reflect a fair, if imperfect, approximation of the use of facilities for whose benefit they are imposed." Evansville, 405 U. S., at 716-717. While those operations generate the concessions' customer flow and, thus, benefit the concessions, only the Airlines and general aviation actually use the runways and navigational facilities. Accepting the District Court's finding that the Airlines were charged only the break-even costs, the Court concludes that the fees in question were not "excessive in comparison with the governmental benefit conferred." Id., at 717. Nor is the Airport's methodology unlawful because it generates large surpluses. Since § 1513(b) applies only to fees charged to "aircraft operators," it does not authorize judicial inquiry focused on the surplus generated from the concessions' fees. The Court rejects the Airlines' argument that it should take into account concession revenues, as the Seventh Circuit did in a 1984 decision, when deciding whether the Airlines' fees are reasonable. The Seventh Circuit overlooked the Department of
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