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Friday, December 28, 2007 Departing
airport head denies he succumbed to the stormy climate By
Benjamin N. Gedan Brewer WARWICK —
They have battled him at every turn, the defenders of wetlands, opponents of
airport expansion and homeowners in earshot of jet engines second-guessing his
positions and tormenting the Federal Aviation Administration as it studies ways
to lengthen the main runway at T.F. Green Airport. But as airport
director Mark P. Brewer packed up his desk last week, he maintained that he had
not been chased out of his job by local opponents. In an hour-long
interview in his third-floor office, with sweeping views of the two runways and
the taxiing Southwest Airlines jets that provide the bulk of the
airport’s traffic, Brewer said he had not soured on mixing it up with the
airport’s critics. “I
don’t believe the city is trying to be obstructionist,” Brewer, 54,
said. “You’ve got a huge piece of infrastructure in the middle of
the city. We do create noise, we do create traffic congestion.” Brewer’s
announcement last month that he was departing for Manchester-Boston Regional
Airport, in New Hampshire, was widely seen as a reaction, at least in part, to
the tumult of running an airport in the state’s second-largest city. Manchester’s
airport might be smaller (3.9 million passengers flew in or out last year,
compared to 5.2 million at Green Airport), and the pay might be lower
(Brewer’s salary will drop to $185,195 from $188,000), but the airport,
built beside sparsely populated land near Londonderry, is a refuge compared to
Green Airport. The expanded
runway in Manchester, allowing transcontinental flights that are unavailable in
Rhode Island, opened in 2003. Green airport officials have been pushing for a
similar expansion for eight years. At the
Manchester airport, if future expansion creates tension, Brewer will have an
ally where he once found an implacable foe: in New Hampshire, the state’s
major airport is owned by the city government. “Relationships
with the community are very good up there so you can accomplish things,”
Kathleen C. Hittner, chairwoman of the Rhode Island Airport Corporation board
and the president of Miriam Hospital, said in an interview last month.
“It’s a different atmosphere.” (The airport
corporation has been interviewing candidates to replace Brewer. Corporation
lawyer Peter A. Frazier is serving as interim director until the board names
Brewer’s successor, which could happen soon.) Warwick Mayor
Scott Avedisian, a frequent airport critic, calls Brewer a skilled communicator
who improved relations with the city. “With Mark, we never had to fight
to get a seat at the table,” he said yesterday. “He knew we had to
be there.” But dealing with
City Hall and neighborhood concerns, Avedisian said, could not have been
pleasant. “You have
relationships strained to the point of breaking,” said Avedisian, who has
met with Brewer monthly since Brewer became airport president in 2004, after
serving as executive vice president and chief operation officer for seven
years. “It’s a job that requires a lot of diplomacy and tact. Mark
wanted to run an airport, not be constantly at public hearings talking about
what an airport should look like. That’s one of the real chores in trying
to run an airport in the middle of a city with 90,000 people.” Brewer has faced
other challenges, including turnover among board members and his senior staff
and, more recently, declining passenger traffic and revenue. In the last fiscal
year, the airport suffered a revenue drop for the first time this decade,
brought about by a 9-percent decline in passengers. The year’s total was
5.2 million, the lowest since 2003. Brewer has also
been overseeing a complex, $83.5-million renovation of the terminal, and the
construction of a long-delayed, $242-million transportation hub that will give
travelers in Boston rail access to Green Airport. Despite those
pressures, Brewer says he was not looking to leave Green Airport when he was
urged to apply for the job in Manchester. Local opposition, and the disbanding
of the major pro-runway expansion group, had not left him weary or isolated, he
said. “That has
had absolutely nothing to do with it,” said Brewer, who has relatives in
Massachusetts and New Hampshire. “I enjoy getting to know the community,
even if there are differences of opinion. You’ve got a vocal group of
individuals raising very valid concerns.” “It’s
not an opportunity I was looking for. I’m happy here,” Brewer said.
“Manchester is similar to T.F. Green. We face the same challenges.”
In his
application for the Manchester job, Brewer wrote that, in Warwick,
“communication between elected officials and the airport has never been
better.” Patti Goldstein,
who has worked for the airport corporation for 12 years, said the runway
expansion had left Brewer and the airport’s neighbors at loggerheads. But
she said Brewer was not discouraged by the feuding. “Those are
tough issues. It’s a very delicate balance and at times it was difficult.
You didn’t want to see the process get delayed,” Goldstein, the
airport’s spokeswoman and vice president of public affairs and air
service marketing, said. But in meetings with Brewer, she said, “it
didn’t seem like it got him down. It never appeared that it was something
that was burdensome.” Nor has Brewer
lost faith in the runway expansion, which he says is needed to meet new FAA
safety standards and to make Green Airport competitive with Logan International
Airport, in Boston. The recent
downturn in passenger traffic and shift to smaller aircraft at Green Airport,
Brewer said, should not derail plans to stretch the runway from its current
7,166 feet to 9,350 feet. “You’re not building it for right now.
You’re building it for the next 20 years and beyond,” he said. “It’s
not ‘Build it and they will come.’ We know they’re coming, so
what kind of infrastructure do we need to be able to accommodate that
growth?” Brewer also
played down fears that the cost of the expansion — an estimated $500
million — is prohibitively high, given the FAA’s proposed contribution
of $150 million. Opponents of the project have used those figures to undermine
the effort. Last month, two Warwick Democratic state representatives, Joseph M.
McNamara and Eileen S. Naughton, criticized the cost of the expansion in a
letter to the airport corporation. The FAA is not
the only source of financial support, Brewer said in the interview last Friday,
arguing that federal highway grants could pay for part of the project, which
will probably involve relocating major roadways that border the airport. Any new
borrowing by the airport corporation, Brewer said, will be paid for out of
airport income, not by state tax receipts that help subsidize other independent
state agencies. (The airport corporation paid $19.2 million in debt service
last year. Next year, it will begin paying debt service on money borrowed for
the terminal improvements. Payments for the transportation hub will start when
construction ends, in about three years.) “There are
certainty other options that are available” to pay for the runway
expansion, Brewer said. “I would not get overly concerned.”Change
in command Three directors
have managed T.F. Green Airport since the Rhode Island Airport Corporation was
formed, in December 1992. The corporation’s board is conducting a national
search for the fourth. Elaine Roberts Dec. 1994- Dec. 2000 Resigned to run
Columbus International Airport, in Ohio Michael G.
Cheston Jan. 2001- March 2004 Resigned for a
private aviation consulting job Mark P. Brewer July 2004- Dec. 2007 Resigned to run
the Manchester-Boston Regional Airport |
