Houston Mayor White informed months ago of foreign airport projects

Houston Mayor Bill White was informed nearly a year and a half ago that a nonprofit arm of the Houston Airport System was heavily involved in building and running airport facilities in several other countries, public records show.
The mayor, who last month helped spur the sudden retirement of longtime airport system chief Richard M. Vacar, was told in mid-January 2008 that the airport system and its top officials were involved in airport projects in Dublin, Ireland, and Mumbai and New Delhi, India, along with a proposal to build a new airport in Denton County, Texas, and to take over Chicago’s Midway Airport if it were privatized.
Also on that list were the Houston Airport System’s possible involvement in privatizing six airports in Colombia, and developing a new facility at V.C. Bird International Airport in Antigua, an airport named for the father of the man who “knighted” Houston financier Allen Stanford.
White signed off on that project list but added a handwritten amendment to it, requiring that Houston airport officials charge a “substantial premium” for the services they were offering to the outside airports, and that they provide the city with quarterly profit-and-loss statements for the nonprofit. Click here to see part of the list signed off on by White.
The mayor has said that he had increasing concerns in the weeks leading up to Vacar’s departure about the extent to which Houston Airport System employees worked for the nonprofit.
The work by Vacar and other Houston airport officials in support of their overseas operations continued to grow after the mayor signed that letter. While documents show that Houston officials later backed away from the Midway airport deal, and didn’t win out on the Colombia projects, other records show that Vacar and other Houston airport officials worked in 2008 and early 2009 to do business in Nicaragua, Libya, China, El Salvador and Macedonia.
25/06/09 Jennifer Peebles/Texas Watchdog, USA

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Categories: Airports Jun 2009, Foreign Jun 2009