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Ethics lessons a must for airport manager

Zephyrhills wants a uniter and promoter of economic development to serve as its next airport manager. We would like to suggest another trait: Someone strong on ethics who understands that even the appearances of impropriety should be avoided.

It's a characteristic that also needs to be injected into the city's advisory boards, most notably the Airport Authority, where one member failed to disclose his past financial ties in a recent dispute.

As detailed recently by Times staff writer Molly Moorhead, the forced resignation of Jim Werme as airport manager in November is connected in part to a questionable deal that featured unsigned contracts, hangar owners with free rent and Werme with a new hangar of his own.

In spring 2005, Werme authorized five hangars from Tampa North Aero Park to move to Zephyrhills Municipal Airport because of pending construction at the Tampa North facility in Wesley Chapel. The hangars, semipermanent T-shape structures, are valued at $5,000 to $15,000 and cost about $6,000 to move.

But, neither the owners nor the city signed leases and Werme never collected rent. In other words, the hangar owners received free use of public land after Werme acquired one of the hangars for himself. Through sloppiness, inattention to detail or quid pro quo, Werme failed his fiduciary responsibility to the city. City Manager Steve Spina was correct to ask for his resignation.

Spina said Werme told him he paid for the hangar, but never produced documentation. The city auditor investigated for possible fraud, but interest waned because Werme resigned.

Regardless, the appearance is unsettling and the former airport manager should have known better, particularly after facing a corruption investigation in the 1990s. Werme, in 1998, was investigated but cleared of wrongdoing after agreeing to give flying lessons to a contractor in exchange for work at Werme's private property in Trilby. The deal drew scrutiny because the contractor also had a city contract to do $24,000 in road-paving work at the airport.

Werme showed poor judgment then and did so again with the hangars. Failing to produce leases in a timely manner cast suspicions on his motives, left the hangar owners in a lurch and required the Airport Authority to make a difficult decision.

In December, a month after Werme resigned, the Airport Authority scuttled the deal and ordered the hangars removed within a year. That decision, too, is problematic because Authority member Jim Spears participated in the debate but failed to reveal that he had owned one of the hangars before selling it to another party.

To his credit, Spears abstained from voting. Still, he should have disclosed why at the outset of the discussion and should have remained silent during the debate instead of acting as an advocate for the hangar owners. Spears was appointed to the authority by his nephew, council member Daniel Burgess Jr., but did not join the panel until after he had moved his hangar to the city airport.

The episode highlighted the lack of training for the city's volunteer boards. Newly elected city officials receive training from the Florida League of Cities, but Zephyrhills only schools its appointed board members in state laws governing financial disclosure forms and the Government in the Sunshine Law.

More training to avoid potential conflicts of interest "is probably something to seriously think about," Spina said.

Indeed. It's the same thinking that should be shared with whoever is hired as the next manager of the city-owned airport.

[Last modified January 11, 2006, 00:41:19]