in Houston, Texas

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As the airport system's network of private companies expanded over the years, HASDC has also sent someone through the revolving door to one of its spinoff entities: Jeff Scheferman, the former Marine officer who became president and CEO of the nonprofit in 2006, left it last year to become president of ADC & HAS, the for-profit joint venture between HASDC and the private Canadian firm Airport Development Corp.

In a major profile of HASDC's international work published in Airport Business magazine in January, ADC & HAS was described as "tasked with flushing out new opportunities such as Quito."

Gary Lantner, who replaced Scheferman as CEO of HASDC, described the setup then:

“Bob [White] and I are at HASDC; ADC HAS, which is run by Jeff, is the privatization airport group,” explains Lantner. “That’s the group that was started in May, as we began to unbundle ourselves.

“We clearly have the mission of offering consulting and training; they have the mission of setting up and operating airports. They will come to us to rent Bob if they need to. They’re the first point of contact in sniffing out a deal.”

This sometimes-blurry pattern of employee moves, between the public airport system, HASDC and the many offshoot operations of those two, is seen as a good way to retain strong employees, said former Houston City Councilman Mark Goldberg, who voted in 2004 to approve some of the contracts between the city and the nonprofit.

“We didn’t want to lose valuable employees to another corporation so we did this,” Goldberg said. “Rather than employees leaving, they would be loaned out through this enterprise and they would not be paid through taxpayer funds. The other thing was that … if our airport system helped build other airports, it would create relationships down the line when we were looking to expand our own airport system.”

Whether the full-time jobs at the nonprofit and its spinoff firms pay more than those working for the city-run airport system is unclear.

The city of Houston is trying to withhold a list of airport system employees' names and salaries for calendar year 2008 following a state Public Information Act request by Texas Watchdog; that issue is currently pending before the state attorney general. At the same time, HAS Development Corp. has also rebuffed Texas Watchdog's request for its 2008 salary list, claiming it is not a government entity and therefore is not subject to the state public records law.

The one full-time HASDC employee in 2007 whose salary is public was Scheferman, whose $237,388 in pay is among the basic financial information that the nonprofit had to report on its tax filing to the Internal Revenue Service for that year; that document is public under federal tax laws, and Texas Watchdog procured a copy from the nonprofit research Web site Guidestar.org.

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Have tips, thoughts or comments about the airport system or any other part of city government? Contact Steve Miller at stevemiller@texaswatchdog.org or post in the comments below.

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