Santa Fe airport manager resigns
Humphres oversaw addition of commercial service to Phoenix, new master plan
Cameron Humphres, manager of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport, is resigning after 19 months on the job.
Nick Schiavo, the city’s public works director, who oversees transportation division, said Monday that Humphres had submitted his letter of resignation and his last day will be Oct. 27.
Members of the city’s airport advisory board said Humphres informed them of his decision at their meeting late last week.
Humphres said in an interview Monday he had accepted a position elsewhere in New Mexico but declined to elaborate.
“Overall, we were able to achieve a lot as a community,” Humphres said, noting the addition of commercial service to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and the finalization of a new airport master plan.
Schiavo said he would serve as interim airport manager until a replacement is found.
The city airport on the far southwest side is in the opening stages of implementing a decadeslong series of big-ticket improvements with an eye on overhauled infrastructure and increased passenger traffic. Humphres’ departure leaves the facility without an experienced captain as the development work outlined in the recently adopted master plan begins to take shape.
Those planned improvements — the vast majority to be funded through federal and state grants — could run to the tens of millions and include a new taxiway and new runway, among other possible upgrades such as a new passenger terminal. The Santa Fe airport is seeking to gain a regional toehold in the commercial air market dominated by the Albuquerque International Sunport.
“The point, for me, is not to lose any momentum,” said Schiavo. He added Humphres had been instrumental in securing Federal Aviation Administration grants and said the city would seek to find a successor with similar managerial and airport-operation experience.
Airport observers had come to see Humphres as a steady hand during what was and will continue to be an essential period for the airport.
“It’s a blow,” said Michael Szczepanski, a member of the advisory board and
pilot who runs a sport aviation business from the Santa Fe airport. “There’s incredible complexity to airport operations, and he had a really good grasp of those complexities and could see the right way to do things.”
“Everything you’ve heard about in last year and a half, he’s spearheaded,” said Marc Coan, a self-described airport activist who gives flying lessons at the airport. “The airport has really turned a corner. It used to be kind of an ignored stepchild. … [Humphres] helped solidify things.”
Coan added he felt Humphres represented a level of “professionalism” he said the airport has rarely had in its history.
Simon Brackley, chief executive of the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce who also sits on the airport advisory board, agreed.
“He’s very qualified, very professional; in my opinion, done an outstanding job,” said Brackley. “We’ll be sorry to see him go.”
Humphres, a Los Alamos native and pilot, was selected from nearly 30 other applicants for the $92,000-a-year position in late 2015 and began work in March 2016.
He had been teaching airport management in New Zealand at the time and had previously spent eight years as the executive director of Rapid City Regional Airport in South Dakota.
Before his hiring, the manager position had been vacant for more than a year after Frances Jesson, Humphres’ predecessor, was fired after police said she trashed a gift shop in a Ruidoso hotel where she had been attending a conference on the city’s behalf.
Brackley said long periods without an airport manager had put some projects behind schedule. Humphres, he said, was responsible for “catching us up to where we should’ve been,” noting federal and state grants as well as maintenance projects. “I think we’re where we need to be,” he said.
On Monday the city Finance Committee approved grants that will help fund an overlay of the airport’s primary runway and a rehabilitation of its main taxiway as well as a resolution that would rename the airport the Santa Fe Regional Airport.