nonstops to Atlanta (Delta) and Pittsburgh (USAir) appeared in the next couple of years; Delta later added Cincinnati and USAir tried Baltimore. Privatization In 1994 George Pataki campaigned on improving efficiencies by privatizing money-losing state projects. Ronald Lauder, who had written a book about European successes in privatizations, suggested Stewart be privatized. Pataki created the New York State Council on Privatization and appointed Lauder its chair. Federal law at the time required that all airports providing passenger service had to be owned by some public entity. With much support from the New York delegation, the United States Congress eventually passed legislation allowing five airports to be privatized as a pilot program, providing certain conditions, such as approval by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and by the carriers representing at least two-thirds of the airport's flights. In 1997 the state formally began, through the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), the process of soliciting bids for a 99-year lease on the airport and, potentially, the adjacent undeveloped lands as well, whatever bidders wanted. Efforts by SPARC, now headed by Kissam's widow Sandra, and other citizen activists to find out about who might be bidding and what they planned to do with Stewart were blocked by the state's invocation of a clause in its State Finance Law prohibiting disclosure of competitive bids prior to the award of the contract: an interpretation that survived a court challenge. Two years later, after approval by the state's attorney general and comptroller as well as the FAA and the carriers, the contract was awarded to the UK-based National Express PLC, the only one of five bidders to have declined to present at a special forum organized a week prior to award, and also a company Lauder had praised in his book for its success with the UK's national bus service and subsequent acquisition of East Midlands Airport, leading to some suspicions that the state had always intended to give it the airport from the beginning. NEG (National Express Group) was prepared to pay $35 million for the lease, and after working out the details Pataki handed over a ceremonial key at the passenger terminal in late 2000. The award also ended, for the most part, the controversy over whether to develop the properties or not. NEG was uninterested in the lands west of Drury Lane, and Pataki announced with the privatization deal that he was directing that