Emotions flared at an Oct. 28 meeting of the Sedona Oak Creek Airport Authority Board of Directors meeting over the selection of nominees to fill two vacancies on the board.
Following the resignation of two board members this summer, SOCAA solicited applications for the vacancies from the public and received an “unprecedented” nine applications for the volunteer board, praised as a beneficial development by current board members.
The nine applicants were interviewed in late October by a nominating committee comprised of two board members and two non-board members and, after reviewing candidate materials, the committee unanimously recommended candidates David Palm and Timothy Miller, who are both owners of aircraft registered in Sedona, for nomination.
These two candidates were supposed to meet with the full board for final interviews in executive session late in the meeting, but John Steward, a representative of the Sedona Airport Hangar Owners, an informal association of hangar owners and tenants at the airport, raised objections to the nominating committee’s selection process during the public comment period and succeeded in compelling the board to postpone interviews and voting on Palm and Miller’s nominations.
SAHO represents a constituency of airport stakeholders that previous airport general managers have blamed for becoming overly involved in airport operations and governance.
Outgoing general manager Deborah Abingdon, who was terminated in September, told the Sedona Red Rock News that hangar owners and tenants treat the Sedona airport as their “fiefdom,” even though they have no official standing with SOCAA or Yavapai County, which leases the airport to SOCAA.
Besides being a leader of SOHA, Steward was also an applicant to the board who was not selected for a final interview.
Steward, backed by a handful of SOHA members in the audience and SOCAA board member Steve Hein, who aligned himself with the SOHA members making the complaint, claimed that the board did not follow a previously established process for candidate evaluation agreed to by SOCAA and the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors.
Hein, speaking in support of delaying the nominations, claimed that in 2014, following the nomination of a candidate with clear conflicts of interest — an owner of a water company with business on the Airport Mesa — SOCAA and Yavapai County agreed to a process that, among other provisions, gave SOHA an explicit role in the candidate review process.
But SOCAA Board President Harold Idell and board member David Cooper said they were not aware of such an agreement and sought to clarify whether the county and SOCAA ever explicitly approved a process that included the airport’s hangar owners group, among other provisions.
When Cooper asked Steward if he had documents showing approval for a specific selection procedure by the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors, Cooper became visibly exasperated when Stewart responded, “It’s a series of emails.”
Cooper also argued that regardless of how the board had handled nominations in previous years, the evaluation process conducted this month was sound, and he saw no reason for the nominations of Miller and Palm not to proceed.
“It looks, smells, sounds and feels like a very fair process,” he said. “Whether we were departing from some other process, I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything that locks us into something else.”
Russ Demaray, a former SOCAA board member, said in the meeting that he did not recall the county approving a specific format for candidate selection in 2014.
Late in the sometimes heated public discussion, Steward advanced an argument that Yavapai County would want SAHO involved in selecting board members because the county has said it wants stakeholder involvement.
That was a bridge too far for Vice President Pam Fazzini.
“I did have a discussion with the county. They called me. They were very unhappy with how SAHO has been involved,” she responded.
Fazzini then alluded to the Yavapai County Board of Supervisors’ power to veto SOCAA’s selected candidates and advance their own nominees, codified by SOCAA’s lease with the county, and warned that if SOCAA stalled or gave SOHA too much influence in the process, Yavapai County might inject itself in the process.
Earlier in the meeting, Idell said he had asked the county about procedures for nominating and said it did not give him specific guidelines.
Gene Comroe, one of the non-board members on the nominating committee, took umbrage during the meeting with the timing of Steward and Hein’s complaints.
“Why didn’t somebody, before we put in all the effort and trouble to interview [candidates] and using the same standards for each person, say that we were all wrong, we shouldn’t have done it, we should be using a different process,” Comroe said.
“It seems like we were given criteria and questions to ask each of the candidates, and they had a chance to ask questions, and they could have asked, ‘why are you doing it this way? We’ve always done it a different way.’ And we didn’t hear any of that,” he said.
Following public discussion, the board convened an executive session to discuss the nominations and other issues, including the appointment of an interim general manager.
Afterward, Idell told the NEWS that the board decided to put the final interviews of Miller and Palm on hold while the board looks into Steward and Hein’s claims about an approved process with the county.
The board’s search for candidates to fill its vacancies is coming at a critical time: The airport installed Operations Manager Edward Rose as interim general manager at the end of the meeting, and the SOCAA board is scheduled to participate in a court-ordered mediation session with Dakota Territory Tours in late November. SOCAA and Dakota have been parties in a lawsuit for several years over hanger rentals.
According to Jack Fields, assistant county administrator for Yavapai County, discussion and possible action on SOCAA’s list of candidates in on the agenda for the Yavapai Board of Supervisors’ Nov. 6 meeting in Prescott.
Scott Shumaker can be reached at 282-7795 ext 117 or by email at sshumaker@larsonnewspapers.com.
