When the Airport Director Search Committee met July 30 to vote on paring down its list of six semifinalists to three top candidates to recommend to the Metro Council, among those who didn’t make the shortlist was interim director Mike Edwards, who was operations director at the airport before stepping up to the interim role in May.
“Nice guy, just not ready,” Metro Councilwoman and search committee member Chauna Banks said about Edwards, some five hours into the meeting, which can be viewed online. “But nice guy. Nice guy.”
Businessman Johnny Fife, also a member of the search committee, also seemed unimpressed by Edwards.
“I think it’s best he go back to being in the position of operations manager,” Fife says. “He’s a good number two.”
Search committee member Barbara Carpenter was more blunt in her assessment, saying: “I was disappointed … he didn’t come across as I thought he should have come across.”
Despite the reservations of the search committee just a little more than two months ago, the Metro Council tonight is scheduled to consider a measure that would offer the long-vacant position to Edwards on a permanent basis.
Metro Council member Barbara Freiberg, who championed the need for a national search in 2017 after longtime director Anthony Marino had stepped down, is still trying to figure out what went wrong.
Her vision was to bring in a new director with outside experience and fresh ideas about how to attract more direct air service to a regional airport in a mid-sized market. And while the search committee at that July meeting was in lockstep agreement on who its top three candidates would be for the job, the process devolved into a racial battle at the Metro Council level that ultimately resulted in all three top candidates removing their names from consideration.
“This has been the most discouraging process I’ve ever been involved in,” Freiberg says. “And the worst part is that no one seems particularly concerned. It’s just sort of flying below the radar.”
Banks, who has been among those pushing to offer the position to Edwards, has recently said she has gotten to know more about Edwards since that July meeting and she credits him with some of the recent wins at the airport—like securing new air service with Via Airlines, which technically happened under his watch but was in the making long before he became interim director.
But Freiberg is still adamant that Edwards should not be offered the position just because he is a default candidate, and she is hoping to convince her fellow council members to reopen the national search. So far, three of her colleagues have agreed to support that effort, she says.
But even if she secures the additional votes she needs, the council cannot technically take that action tonight because it has not been introduced, which means it would be several more weeks before it could even start. And even if the council were to reopen the search process, Freiberg says there is a very real question about whether any qualified candidate would want the job, given all the negative publicity and heated controversy this process has engendered over the past year.
“Our consultants told us that is a very real possibility,” she says.
