Metro Council member Barbara Freiberg’s hard-fought battle to conduct a national search for a new airport director hit a major snag Wednesday evening, when the Metro Council voted not to approve $34,000 to hire a consulting firm to facilitate the search.
Freiberg, who sits on a seven-member airport director search committee that she pushed the council to create last year, had sponsored two measures.
One would have approved spending $34,000 in self-generated airport funds to hire ADK Consulting, a national firm that specializes in aviation executive searches. The other measure would have approved a contract with ADK.
But the first measure, which needed seven votes to pass, failed on a 5-3 vote with council members Buddy Amoroso, Dwight Hudson and Scott Wilson voting against it. Freiberg, along with LaMont Cole, Donna Collins-Lewis, Erika Green and Tara Wicker, voted for it. Trae Welch, who also sits on the search committee, and Matt Watson left the room before the vote. Chandler Loupe and Chauna Banks, another search committee member, were absent from the meeting.
Once the first measure failed, the second measure effectively failed as well, as no funds were available to enact the contract.
Freiberg says she is disappointed and that the search committee will reconvene Tuesday and decide how to proceed. It could try again to convince seven council members to approve the contract or it could attempt to conduct the search itself.
“Can we do it by ourselves? Sure we can,” Freiberg says. “Can we do it as effectively? No. We can’t do with the expertise of a company that has connections all over the country and knows the skills that are needed for an airport like this.”
The search for a new airport director has become a contentious issue between those who believe a new director with fresh ideas from the outside could potentially increase badly needed direct air service to Baton Rouge. Others say interim director Ralph Hennessy, a Baton Rouge Metro Airport veteran who succeeded longtime director Anthony Marino after he retired in January 2017, has done a good job running what is and will always be a regional airport in a mid-sized market.
Banks says she is troubled by the way the vote went down and believes it suggests nothing at the airport will change. Specifically, she notes that two council members left the room before the vote, including Welch, who is a member of the search committee and has in the past advocated giving the job permanently to Hennessy.
“Based on the behavior of this council, we see that even if we have a national search and select a candidate, they could totally ignore our recommendation and go with someone else,” she says. “They have that liberty and what that says to our community is it’s all about power, who I want, who I can control.”
Welch did not return a call seeking comment. But Amoroso, who voted against appropriating the money for the consulting firm, says he opposed the measure because he was told when he approved creating the search committee it wouldn’t cost any money.
Freiberg says the search committee is not costing any money from the city-parish general operating budget, adding the $34,000 would have come from self-generated airport fees.
—Stephanie Riegel
