On Friday, KTRK-13’s Miya Shay posted news that Richard Vacar, the powerful head of the Houston Airport System, had retired, effective the day before.
Bradley Olson followed up with a lengthy story on the “retirement” for the Chronicle, although there remain more questions than answers about the abrupt departure:
While his reason for leaving remained unclear Friday, several City Hall employees and officials focused on his role leading the Houston Airport System Development Corp., a nonprofit tied to a web of companies that run operations and construction projects at airports in Ecuador and Costa Rica, as well as facilitating training in Houston of Chinese airport officials. In 2005, a cooperative agreement also was announced with the West African nation of Senegal.
White and Vacar were known to get along poorly, according to several officials close to both men, although few expected their relationship to lead Vacar to leave.
This does not have the look or feel of a voluntary retirement of a powerful agency head (especially since HAS staff seemed to have no clue it was coming). Rather, it has the look and feel of someone being pushed out, for reasons that remain unclear.
Perhaps Vacar and Mayor White got crosswise on some issue, like the Costa Rican airport discussions or the revenue expected to accrue to HAS (and not the City of Houston proper) from various deals that Vacar has overseen (with little scrutiny). Perhaps there is some sort of scandal that is about to emerge, and the housecleaning is beginning well in advance. The lack of transparency so far isn’t very helpful.
We hope the city’s watchdog journalists continue to look into the matter. HAS is a fairly big, quasi-public player in the city, and the citizenry deserves better answers about suspiciously abrupt personnel changes. For that matter, we could probably benefit from a closer look at the organization’s dealings over the last decade or so.
BLOGVERSATION: Houblog.
