Airport exec gets 3% raise, $25,000 bonus

Bryan Malinowski, executive director at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/ Adams Field, won a 3% merit raise Tuesday and, thanks to his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, a $25,000 bonus.

Malinowski, who held the top post since June 2019, will now draw an annual salary of $244,007, after the Little Rock Municipal Airport Commission deliberated for more than an hour to evaluate his performance over the past year, which saw passenger travel plummet and airline service cut way back as a result of the pandemic.

The numbers have since rebounded, particularly in the past two months, but they haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Commission member Stacy Hurst made the motion to grant Malinowski the increased compensation. The motion was seconded by Bill Walker. No one on the seven-member commission was heard voting against the motion.

“As we all know, it’s been a particularly difficult year in the travel business and we sincerely appreciate the great work of Mr. Malinowski and his team,” Hurst said. “We recognize Mr. Malinowski’s leadership and he has served the airport very well — again, during a very difficult year.”

The compensation included contributions equal to 5% of Malinowski’s salary to his two retirement accounts.

“I appreciate it,” Malinowski told the commission. “I just want to say I don’t do it by myself. It’s the staff here that makes me look good. I have a wonderful staff. Thank you.”

Malinowski’s last performance evaluation was six months ago. Under the agreement between Malinowski and the commission, the evaluations are supposed to take place every June, the anniversary month of his hiring. But the commission delayed last year’s evaluation because of the pandemic.

Passenger traffic at Clinton National remains down from its pre-pandemic levels, as is airport income. Clinton National, although under city control, receives no funding from Little Rock’s general revenue.

In May, Clinton National had 157,079 passengers departing or arriving. The total marked a 442% increase from the 28,982 passengers who went through the airport in May 2020, about two months after the official beginning of the pandemic in the United States.

But last month’s total only represented 74.73% of the total passengers the airport had in May 2019 when 210,200 passengers went through the airport, according to Rachel Bader, the air service development manager for Clinton National.

For the year, 520,807 passengers have gone through Clinton National. The figure is 19.24% more than the 436,776 in the same five months in 2020.

Revenue has total $10.8 million through the first five months of 2020, almost $1 million less than the $11.7 million the airport received in the same period a year ago.

Mike Huckabee always liked to say that you didn’t know politics until you’d tangled in the church version.

I suspect there’s truth in that. The great scourges of our politics are zealotry and hypocrisy. It is possible that zealotry and hypocrisy exist in reli- gious circles as well.

The first magazine article I ever wrote about Huckabee, in 1990, centered on his emerging as the “moderate” candidate to take the presidency of the Arkansas Baptist Convention. He’d emerged as a healer of sorts between really conservative delegates and really, really conservative ones. It all played out amid controversies in which Ronnie Floyd, the megachurch pastor in Springdale, was embroiled.

Here are a couple of matters worth emphasizing from that preceding paragraph:

■ Did Mike Huckabee just get referred to as a moderate and healer? Have you gotten a load of him lately?

■ Demonstrating again that things tend to stay the same the more they change, that same Ronnie Floyd is now the national Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) executive committee president embroiled in controversies at the group’s convention this week in Nashville. They have to do with the handling of sex-abuse complaints in the denomination. The SBC also is beset by complaints from some of its black pastors, primarily, about its resistance to teaching what right-wingers like to call “critical race theory.” That mainly means telling the truth that America has racist roots that linger still. Then there is a dispute about whether the SBC needs to purge some liberal-leaners not only on race, but on whether women may preach.

Floyd and the rest of the SBC leadership stand accused—and there are tape recordings giving the accusations support—of strategizing to downplay sex-abuse allegations in defense of protecting … get this … the denomination’s “base.”

Presumably the base would be irked in some way if sex-abuse charges got taken seriously in a public way.

I wonder: Where have we heard “base” before in the context of being hostage to it?

If the Southern Baptist Convention sounds like the Trumpian Republican Party, that’s because the Southern Baptist and Trump Republicans are pretty much the same, at least politically if not in a genuine theological way.

The SBC seems to flirt with civil war at the same time the Republican Party tries to figure out whether and how to preserve the cult of Trump while allowing members like Liz Cheney to tell the truth.

There was a simpler time in America when Southern Baptist churches dotted the rural South with tranquility and local autonomy. But the central convention began to get politicized in both theological and secular ways in the 1970s, mainly because of Roe v. Wade, school prayer and what was seen as creeping decay from cultural liberalism.

By 1980, Ronald Reagan had embraced tactically this emerging SBC as part of the broader religious conservative base, a “moral majority.”

Somewhere along the way I started referring to “Republibaptists.”

Today, the SBC remains mostly focused on that ’70s genesis—abortion, school prayer and cultural liberalism, thus Supreme Court nominations, which is what all the fuss comes down to.

That’s how a decidedly irreligious figure like Trump could become by the late 20-teens the hero of the SBC and the Republicans’ broader conservative religious base. He wound up positioned to deliver two possibly decisive conservative Supreme Court nominations.

Today, white Christian nationalism dominates rural America, particularly in the South, and Republicans are clinging to their marriage to it because the nation’s demographic trends are all against them. If not for unfair majority-defying advantages in the Electoral College and the U.S. Senate, Republicans would have nothing much for them except the religious conservative base.

So, when the Southern Baptist Convention gets strung out on sex abuse and racial division, the implications are great, potentially dire, for a Republican Party that can get pretty strung out all by itself.

And when the SBC gathers in its convention to fight about sex abuse and race and its future course of leadership, it qualifies as national news, near the front page, because of the deep American political implications.

The Southern Baptists may need a healer, but Mike Huckabee doesn’t seem to be in that business anymore.

For that matter, we’re in an era in which healers tend to get run over in the middle of the road by the tractor-trailer rigs driven by the zealous and the hypocritical.