The Sedona-Oak Creek Airport Authority Board of Directors ended the 14-month run of Deborah Abingdon as Sedona Airport’s general manager during a tense meeting on Sept. 26.
The board’s 4-1 vote to terminate Abingdon’s contract appeared to be precipitated by a personnel decision she made in August. That month, Abingdon hired an airport assistant manager, William Long, and two weeks later fired Long, notifying the board of the action via email.
At a Sept. 11 meeting, the SOCAA Board of Directors approved a contract to pay a third-party investigator $250 per hour to “determine the circumstances of severance of the gentleman that was severed,” according to Tony Cullum, chief general counsel for SOCAA. Cullum declined to share the investigator’s report or its findings. Abingdon wouldn’t discuss her reasons for firing Long with the Sedona Red Rock News nor during the Sept. 26 board meeting, out of fear of violating privacy rules, but Abingdon asserted during the meeting that she had reasonable cause for firing Long.
“I was doing my job. Now it’s possible that someone or some of you didn’t like the decision that I made,” Abingdon told the board, “but I was doing my job according to all the guidelines that I’ve been given in writing and verbally, and I think it’s as simple as that.” Earlier in the meeting, Director David Cooper claimed that Abingdon had not been forthright with the board about her reasons for terminating her assistant.
“On Aug. 27 you sent an email to the board advising us that a certain employee was no longer with the airport. The employee had only been here for less than two weeks. You gave us a reason as to why that employee was no longer with us and immediately from feedback that was inevitably coming in on that issue, it appeared that was not a truthful statement. So the opportunity today is for you to either amend what you had to say or stand by what you had to say,” Cooper said.
Prior to the Board’s vote to terminate her contract, Abingdon objected to not being able to see or respond to the third-party investigator’s report.
In response to Cooper’s claim and request that Abingdon amend or stand by her email, Abingdon stood by her actions. Shortly after, the board convened an executive session before reconvening and voting to terminate the general manager’s contract. Pam Fazzini, vice president of the board, was the dissenting vote. The board’s motion was for termination “without cause,” “which means there is no reason,” according to SOCAA attorney Cullum.
While Cooper implied in the open meeting that SOCAA’s actions were about issues of honesty, Sedona Airport watchers, including several previous general managers, saw a familiar pattern played out in Abingdon’s firing: A governing board with no oversight micromanaging a professional manager, who in the normal course of operating the airport falls out of favor with the board.
Past general managers claim that the board of directors inevitably becomes aligned with one subset of airport users or another. Abingdon is the fourth general manager of Sedona Airport since the departure of long-time manager Mac McCall in 2012. Abingdon is a long-time aviation professional who previously managed an airport in Belen, N.M. In a written statement, the SOCAA board disputed the idea the turnover in general managers has been unusual, pointing out that one of the five recent general managers, Russell Widmar, who served from 2015 to 2016, took the job on an interim basis. The statement also claims that SOCAA’s administration “has been successful in running a safe and compliant operation which is financially sound, has no debt and has implemented more than $20 million in infrastructure improvements over the last 20 years utilizing state and federal grants.”
All of the airport’s five recent general managers — including McCall — left the position under acrimonious conditions. Previous managers said that the rules for constituting the Board of Directors leads to inevitable conflict between the board and the airport’s professional staff, making the role of general manager especially challenging. Rod Probst, who was general manager of Sedona Airport from 2012 to 2015, said that airplane owners leasing hangar space at Sedona Airport wielded outsized influence over the management of the facility and are frequently overrepresented on the Board of Directors. The Sedona Airport leases about 70 hangars, and former managers said lessees of hangar space are a powerful group that frequently comes into conflict with general managers.
“I loved living in Sedona, I loved running that airport, from the perspective of the staff was great, there just always was some consternation between what I knew needed to be done and what the [airport] users wanted to have happen,” Probst said. “I’m pretty good at this, I’ve been doing it a long time and the current situation in Sedona is just untenable for whoever they hire,” Probst continued.
“The manager is never going to be successful and be able to do the job as long as the Airport Authority Board of Directors are all tenants on the airport,” he said.
In a letter obtained by the NEWS and written by Widmar, who served as general manager from 2015 to 2016, Widmar wrote that hangar tenants “have tried to influence me to hire and replace certain employees …. I am constantly told how to do things that I have been doing for 40 years. Then they don’t want to do things that might be inconvenient such as improving airfield security.”
Chip Davis, who was the Yavapai County District 3 supervisor from 1996 to 2016, attempted to get the county, which owns the airport and leases it to SOCAA, more involved in the administration of the airport during his tenure.
“Some folks have the outlook that the airport is a private country club and that they are not accountable or responsible to anyone. That’s a very dangerous setting for an organization to have,” Davis said. “My approach was that you have some type of an advisory board made up of different stakeholders that are affected by the airport and allow them to be part of the decision-making process.”
Probst, the former manager, had a similar suggestion.
“I’ve been around airport advisory commissions and committees for 26 years, and you need a mix of both users and tenants and constituents that live around the airport that represent those communities,” he said. “I can remember one of the complaints that I would get when I would go to different meetings in the city of Sedona is the constituents and the folks that lived downtown felt that they have no vehicle, no avenue to even approach the airport about what was even going on.” In remarks to the NEWS following her firing, Abingdon’s assessment of SOCAA aligned with those of Probst and Davis.
“The reason that there is a revolving door of managers out of Sedona Airport is because tenants are allowed to get involved in the day-to-day operations,” Abingdon said. “They don’t want people standing up to them. They want to run the airport; this is their little fiefdom.” Sedona City Councilman Scott Jablow, who serves as a liaison between the city and airport, told the NEWS that “Deborah
Abingdon worked hard to build a great partnership between the airport authority and the city, and it’s disappointing to hear of her termination.” Jack Fields, assistant county administrator for Yavapai County, attended the last two SOCAA Board meetings and will be updating the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors on recent developments during an upcoming executive session of the Board of Supervisors. Yavapai County leases the airport to SOCAA to operate in the public interest and has some oversight built into its lease, but in the past there has been limited communication between the county and airport. Current Yavapai County District 3 Supervisor and Board Chairman Randy Garrison said the county is aware of Abingdon’s termination.
“I know they have a hard time keeping general managers, and we’ll be, and have been over the last year, meeting with the [SOCAA] board on a much more regular basis to try and not only figure out if there’s ways that we can help them with their management of the facility, but also making sure that we keep lines of communication open between the city of Sedona and the airport and the county on anything that happens on that mesa,” Garrison said.
Scott Shumaker can be reached at 282-7795 ext 117 or by email to sshumaker@larsonnewspapers.com
