If Turkia Awada Mullin is as good as she claims to be at what she does, the now-former boss of Detroit Metro Airport shouldn’t have any trouble landing a new job, maybe in the private sector where she can be paid what she thinks she’s really worth.
In the meantime, the board that runs the airport — one of those obscure public bodies that never makes news until they screw up — did right to cut their losses on Mullin after seven weeks, even if those losses amount to another $700,000 (plus damages and legal fees.) Eating crow never tastes good, but it goes down better while still warm.
Mullin was damaged goods and Metro Airport is far too important to the economic redevelopment of southeast Michigan to keep her in charge of it. She has too many credibility issues of her own making to be an effective leader not just of a vital, world-class aviation hub but of the long-planned “aerotropolis” growth that’s supposed to be happening around it.
The seven-member airport authority, political appointees all, wouldn’t say what the specific reasons were for their 5-2 vote to oust Mullin, other than catch-all language in her contract defining just cause as “dishonesty, theft, willful misconduct, breach of fiduciary duty or unethical business conduct.” Mullin brought a lawyer to the meeting and said she’ll sue for full payment of her two-year contract, which the lawyer figured at $708,000.
If Mullin gets it, the traveling public can look to pay its share soon in airline tickets and parking fees.
Authority members who hired her in the first place are accountable for that, and they all ought to think about doing what Mullin wouldn’t — resigning. They could have saved a lot of money and trouble by checking into Mullin’s grandiose resume, which the Free Press had little trouble deflating last week. Clearly, Mullin has not been the job-creating dynamo she claimed in taking credit for just about every economic development in Wayne County since Cadillac’s arrival Detroit in 1701. And that resume was the main reason she got the airport job — to at last get the aerotropolis plans rolling.
The $200,000 going-away present Mullin accepted from Wayne County when she took the airport job created a smelly mess that has yet to be fully fumigated but that’s not an airport problem. That’s between Mullin, the county, and now the FBI.
However, what should have been an issue for the airport folks is the thousands more county dollars Mullin took for unused sick time nine days after signing a document that the $200,000 severance was all she was entitled to. That’s an integrity issue.
Last week, Wayne County Executive Bob Ficano effectively pulled the rug out from under Mullin when he said she’d become a distraction. Once Ficano, chief promoter of all things aerotropolis and a singer of Mullin’s praises when she sought the airport job, said, in effect, he couldn’t work with her, the major part of Mullin’s raison d’hiring at Metro went pfffft.
What a sorry mess. Back in 2002, when then-Gov. John Engler and then-County Exec Ed McNamara jointly announced creation of the new board to oversee Metro, the Free Press hoped for seven people who would bring “a new spirit of professionalism, efficiency, integrity and openness” to the troubled airport.” We should have included competence.
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