Nearly three dozen hopefuls applied to be Baton Rouge’s next airport director. Of those, 19 met the baseline criteria for the position established by a search committee earlier this year and are currently going through the vetting process, says Metro Council member Barbara Freiberg, who chairs the airport director search committee.
Florida-based executive search firm ADK Consulting is handling that vetting process and has told Freiberg the applicants are all strong candidates. At least one, she says, is from Baton Rouge—interim director Mike Edwards.
Freiberg doesn’t know if any other applicants are local.
At this point in the process, the candidates are answering written questions and conducting video interviews with ADK. By mid-July, the firm will present a short list of 4-6 candidates to the committee, which will interview them in person in Baton Rouge.
By late July, Freiberg hopes to have three finalists to recommend to the Metro Council, which, in its capacity as the Airport Authority, will select the new director.
“My goal is to get some fresh ideas (for the airport),” says Freiberg, who, for months, has led the charge to conduct a national search for a new airport director.
The search for a new airport director became a contentious issue in late 2017 between those who wanted to bring in an outsider to run the airport and those who wanted to appoint then-interim director Ralph Hennessy to the job permanently.
Hennessy was a veteran executive of the Baton Rouge Metro Airport, who served under longtime director Anthony Marino until Marino’s retirement in January 2017.
In March, Freiberg was successful in convincing the Metro Council to create a search committee and approve the use of $34,000 in self-generated airport funds to hire ADK.
At the time, Hennessy was expected to apply for the job. He has since left the airport to work for a national aviation consulting firm, leaving the field of candidates wide open.
Freiberg says she is encouraged there has been so much interest in the position.
