Metro Council member Barbara Freiberg doesn’t think she has the seven votes needed to pass a resolution that would establish a committee to conduct a national search for a new airport director. Still, Freiberg plans at Wednesday’s meeting to press ahead with the measure, which was introduced by the council earlier this month.
“I believe it’s the right thing to do,” Freiberg says. “Not to conduct a search is to say we don’t really care.”
She faces an uphill battle. Several council members say they support giving the job to Ralph Hennessy, who has been serving as interim director of the Baton Rouge Metro Airport since longtime director Anthony Marino retired in January. Hennessy previously served for years as assistant director under Marino.
“I think we have a guy who would be pretty darned good at the job,” says Councilmember Matt Watson, who Freiberg had considered a swing vote that might go in her favor. “He’s been here, he’s part of the development. He learned from Anthony. How are we going to get anyone better than Ralph?”
Freiberg’s argument has been that the community shouldn’t settle for “good” until it’s scouted around to see if there aren’t any better options. She doesn’t have a problem with Hennessy per se but believes it’s important to see if there aren’t any outside candidates who can bring fresh ideas about how to increase direct air service to the market.
“Even if we don’t hire a search firm, we should at least advertise the position in national trade publications,” she says.
Freiberg says she has talked to just a handful of her fellow council members and knows of only one, Erika Green, who has committed to supporting her measure.
The issue over the airport director underscores the larger issue of what the airport can and should aspire to be. It gets high marks for being clean and efficient, and it runs a financially successful industrial business park on its property. But because the market is relatively small, Baton Rouge suffers from a frustrating lack of direct air service. Could a new airport director help change that dynamic? Freiberg says it’s worth a shot.
But Watson and others, including Trae Welch and Buddy Amoroso, say that’s not really the airport director’s job, nor is it realistic.
“Baton Rouge is a medium market airport 86 miles from New Orleans, which is greatly subsidized because of tourism and conventions,” Amoroso says. “We will never be able to get a Southwest Airlines, especially now because of consolidation. We’re never going to get the direct flights to major markets that we’d like to have.”
—Stephanie Riegel
