Mayor-elect Michael Hancock’s aviation issues transition team is recommending that Denver International Airport’s top leadership get two or three more political appointees in addition to the current sole position named by the mayor — manager of aviation.
In a report issued July 1, the aviation transition team said one of the additional senior-level appointees would focus on business development, while another could be chief of staff for the aviation manager, with primary responsibility for human resources, marketing and other administrative functions at the airport.
“A third senior-level appointee could focus on the areas of community outreach and the extremely important function of serving as the liaison with the DIA concessionaire group,” the report said.
Three more political appointees would likely add hundreds of thousands of dollars in personnel costs to DIA’s budget and potentially be seen as political patronage.
In a statement released Friday, Hancock said he is reviewing the committee’s report and “all options are on the table; no decisions have been made.”
Hancock said that he sees the DIA gateway “as a corridor of opportunity, where the city could focus on economic development and sustainable industry clusters.”
The aviation transition team had 18 members, and its co-chairs included Denver attorney Steve Kaplan, who served as city attorney in the administration of former Denver Mayor Federico Peña and later as general counsel of the U.S. Department of Transportation when Peña was secretary of that agency; Lori Fox, a government affairs official for United Airlines in Denver; and Michael Cheroutes, who is director of Colorado’s High Performance Transportation Enterprise and has a consulting contract with DIA.
A number of the transition group’s members represent concessionaires at DIA.
The report said airport leadership needs to “improve communication with, and response to the issues of, (the) concession community.”
There are “too many rules and regulations, applied with too much bureaucratic rigor,” the report added. “Concessionaires should be treated as business partners, not employees.”
In response, DIA spokesman Jeff Green said, “We go to great lengths to have an open and collaborative dialogue with our concessionaires and anybody who does business with the airport.
“There is a very deliberative process that we as a city agency must follow, and as an airport we have additional federal regulations to adhere to as well,” Green said.
Current Denver aviation manager Kim Day will resign her post once Hancock becomes mayor, and she reportedly is one of a dozen people who have applied for the position in the Hancock administration.
Jeffrey Leib: 303-954-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com
